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The Metropolitan St. Louis Sewer District is asking the court to order Kinloch to pay the principal of $407,231.80 in delinquent sewer charges from 56 addresses, plus late fees. The suit was filed this month in St. Louis County Circuit Court.

“It’s not like we sue somebody within 60 days,� said MSD finance director Marion Gee. “We spent years trying to get them to the table to talk to us about this issue so that we could work out an agreement with them.�

Some of the delinquent charges were due at least 11 years ago, if not longer. But Kinloch didn’t respond to years of efforts by MSD to collect the charges or negotiate a payment plan, Gee said.

Kinloch appears to be the only city MSD has sued over delinquent bills. In 2007, a county judge ordered Kinloch to pay $94,863 after MSD sued to collect the bills.

Kinloch still hasn’t paid that amount in full either, Gee said. No other public entity has gotten as far behind on their bills, he said.

“This is an unusual case,� he said.

For Kinloch, a municipality of about 264 residents where the median household income is $38,281, a judgement would prove costly.

Kinloch City Administrator Justine Blue said in an email that the city had not been formally served the lawsuit as of Monday and did not respond to other questions.

Mayor Evelyn Carter and four members of the Board of Aldermen did not return email requests for comment and could not be reached by phone; a city attorney for Kinloch could not be reached, either.

The first town in Missouri to be incorporated by African Americans, Kinloch was home to about 5,000 residents by the 1980s, when St. Louis Lambert International Airport bought more than 1,000 homes for a noise-mitigation program. The population plummeted, Kinloch’s tax base dwindled and buildings rotted.

Meanwhile, the local government endured a wave of scandals. In 2011, a mayor was sentenced to federal prison for spending tens of thousands of city dollars on vacation travel and personal expenses. Two other mayors were impeached by aldermen. In 2017, a fire chief was sentenced to federal prison for stealing money from the city’s fire protection district.

In recent years, reports of widespread illegal dumping in Kinloch have spurred local and regional officials to pursue redevelopment there.

The city installed security cameras as part of a crackdown on illegal dumping. The nonprofit St. Louis County Parks Foundation is leading a $1.5 million renovation of Kinloch Park, a county-owned park in the city. And in October, the St. Louis Economic Development Partnership began identifying large-scale sites in Kinloch that could be redeveloped into warehouses to help bring jobs to the city.

The city has also been kept afloat through an annual $200,000 subsidy from a tax increment financing district established for NorthPark, a 550-acre business park formed in 2005 out of land the airport bought from Kinloch and neighboring cities. The city and district signed a deal in 2015 granting Kinloch the money through 2024.

Kinloch last year reported about $627,410 in revenue with about $100,925 remaining after expenses, according to the city’s latest in financial report with the Missouri auditor’s office.

The amount MSD says Kinloch owes on the 56 properties is worth about two-thirds of the city’s budget last year.

It was unclear Wednesday exactly how Kinloch came into possession of each of the properties. Several properties were originally owned by the City of Kinloch Community Development Association, which MSD named as a co-defendant in the lawsuit.

The association, a redevelopment group formed in 2000, was dissolved by the state in 2015 after it failed to file a registration report.

About $159,000 of the charges Kinloch owes were from accounts due on properties when the city acquired them from the association or other owners, Gee said. He said it did not appear that any of the properties were acquired through tax sales.

Of the 56 accounts due, 14 of them are active and have continued to rack up debts as recently as this month, Gee said. The remaining accounts went offline over previous years.

In all, the delinquent accounts ranged between $76.58 from an address that is now a vacant lot, to $32,007 at an occupied apartment building.

Kinloch’s previous city hall, at 5990 Monroe Avenue is one of the active accounts. The city owes $9,319 for sewer service there.

Other active accounts appeared to be housing the city owns. The city collected $54,733 in revenue from public housing apartment leases in multifamily units the city owns and rents to residents, according to its report to the auditor’s office.

Asked about the impact a judgement could have on Kinloch, Gee said the sewer district’s goal is to get the city to discuss “an appropriate time period in which some of these wastewater bills could be paid.�

Charges customers don’t pay get calculated into the rates the district charges in order to fund its system to serve customers across the county and city, said Sean Stone, an MSD spokesman. The public sewer district covers nearly 1.3 million people in St. Louis and St. Louis County.

“All the money we collect has to do with fulfilling our mission of managing wastewater and treating wastewater,� he said. “When you have a customer that is not paying, that is trickling down and creating hardship for other customers.�