LEXINGTON, Ky. — The Urban County Council voted 10-5 Tuesday to keep the Mint Lane pump station behind Paul Laurence Dunbar High School. It will be torn open, rebuilt, and brought into compliance with a federal consent decree that has shaped this city's sewer policy for 18 years and counting. The bill, as approved, is $19.6 million.

The bill, as actually written, is bigger than that.

That is the awkward truth at the heart of this vote — and it deserves to be stated plainly before the political dust settles around the more comfortable framing the mayor offered Tuesday afternoon. “There is no perfect proposal,” Mayor Linda Gorton told the council, “so we need to focus on the most fiscally responsible choice that checks all the boxes, and that is Mint Lane.” She put the savings at $5.3 million.

Here is what $5.3 million bought: the end, for now, of a state-funded wetland-restoration project on Cave Creek; a 25-acre permanent conservation easement that Kentucky Fish and Wildlife had already proposed at Mill Ridge Farm; and a deferral of the harder, longer-running argument this city has avoided for two decades — what to do about the 13.1 million gallons of sanitary-sewer overflow that have, since just January 2015, washed down through the very farm whose owners spent Tuesday begging the council to let them host the new pump.

The roll call deserves attention. In favor (10): Boone (motion), Brown (second), Curtis, Eblen, Ellinger, Hale, Morton, Reynolds, Sheehan, Wu. Opposed (5): Savigny, Lynch, Baxter, Martin, Beasley. That majority — and the framing that rode in with it — won the day on a single line item: the lowest of three engineering estimates. The other two told different stories. Mill Ridge relocation: $24.9 million to $27.3 million. Blue Grass Airport: $48.4 million, described by acting Public Works Commissioner Charlie Martin in earlier testimony as a “Hail Mary.” When the cheapest option becomes the responsible option, the question of what was being weighed has already been narrowed.

It is worth being clear about the unusual coalition that lined up against Mint Lane and was overruled. Mill Ridge Farm — among the most decorated Thoroughbred operations on the Bluegrass — wanted the pump on its property. Its owner Price Bell told councilmembers that the relocation would unlock the wetland project, a public greenway along Cave Creek, and a permanent answer for the corridor that has been absorbing the leaks for years. The opposition came not from the farm being volunteered, but from other Fayette farms worried that bringing the parcel into pump-station service would fray the Urban Service Boundary — the line that has, for half a century, kept Lexington's signature horse country from being subdivided. “The Urban Service Boundary should not be up for sale,” District 5 resident John Phillips told the council during an earlier work session.

It is a real concern. It is also a concern that, as resolved, leaves the most polluted neighbor with the same pump that has been polluting it.

A few questions are now worth keeping live.

First, the engineering. The Mint Lane site sits over karst geology and partial floodplain. Martin's earlier presentation flagged “constructability challenges” at exactly this location. If the $19.6 million estimate softens once shovels are in the ground — and on a karst site, that is not a pessimistic assumption — at what point does the savings disappear? The council that voted Tuesday has not yet built a public mechanism for revisiting the choice if the cheap option turns expensive.

Second, the deadline. Lexington's 2008 EPA consent decree — the federal court order that drives every one of these conversations — originally required the city to finish this work by 2026. That deadline was extended to 2030 on pandemic-supply-chain grounds. The extension was the city's chance to take the harder path. It chose not to.

Third, the trade. The Cave Creek wetland project and the 25-acre Kentucky Fish and Wildlife easement have not been formally reframed as anything other than dead. If the city believes it can deliver that environmental upside without the relocation — through some other instrument, on some other parcel, on some plausible timeline — that case has not yet been made publicly. It should be.

None of this is to argue the council made the wrong call. Reasonable members disagreed Tuesday in good faith, and “fiscally responsible” is not a slogan — it is a constraint a sewer fund actually lives under. Five councilmembers voted no for what looked from the dais like principled reasons; ten voted yes for what looked like principled reasons of their own. Both sides were arguing about something real.

But “$5.3 million in savings” is not, by itself, a complete account of a decision this big. It is the part that fits in a press release.

The rest of it — the karst, the deadline, the wetland, the gallons — belongs in the public record, too. That is what we will keep watching.