The mayors are easy to identify. Personal corruption findings are not.
Victor's official mayor page identifies Will Frohlich as mayor and says his term expires in 2027. Driggs' official city-council page identifies August Christensen as mayor and says her current term runs from January 2026 to January 2030.
I did not find a verified public record showing either mayor personally charged or convicted in a criminal corruption case from the sources checked here. That matters, because local anger can be justified without pretending there is already a personal indictment when the public record does not show one.
But the money trail under both offices is real
Victor's own rate notice says its sewer rate jumped from $61.04 to $98.50 per month effective October 1, 2024. The city tied that increase to treatment-cost pressure from Driggs' regulatory problems and plant-upgrade needs. Victor's later wastewater finance explainer says the system's FY2026 sewer-fund budget is about $2.19 million and that a Victor-owned plant could push modeled monthly rates into roughly the $126 to $139 range depending on project cost.
Driggs, meanwhile, shows a current in-city sewer base amount of $70.36 under rates effective October 1, 2025 and says its own plant expansion was estimated at $31.6 million at the 30 percent design stage. Those are not abstract planning numbers anymore. They are the public-money consequences of a regional arrangement falling apart.
The federal enforcement record is what makes this bigger than normal city drama
EPA said in January 2025 that Driggs agreed to pay a $400,000 penalty and undertake a major wastewater upgrade over chronic Clean Water Act violations. The federal consent decree says the government's complaint alleged 3,237 permit exceedances plus sampling, recordkeeping, and chain-of-custody problems. Driggs did not admit liability in that decree, but it did agree to the compliance regime.
So when residents ask whether this is just a political spat between mayors, the answer is no. A federal pollution-enforcement record already exists underneath the local fight. That is what turns the mayoral question into a larger governance question.
Victor's lawsuit turned the governance failure into an audit-and-billing fight
Victor's March 5, 2026 complaint against Driggs says the inter-city wastewater agreement required annual independent audits and compliant treatment, but alleges the neutral audit did not happen until 2024 and that Victor had been overpaying. Victor also alleges Driggs failed to cooperate fully with the audit and mishandled debt-service and operating-cost pass-throughs.
Those are still allegations. But they are specific enough to matter, and Victor's own wastewater page says the city approved a 40-acre future treatment site in 2025 and is now pushing a separate plant because it no longer trusts the old arrangement to protect ratepayers or provide enough control over cost and compliance.
What this story does and does not claim
This story does not claim either mayor has already been criminally convicted of corruption, and it does not pretend every allegation in Victor's lawsuit has been proven. The record is not that broad.
But the public record already supports a narrower claim: the Victor-Driggs money trail is bigger than either mayor's public branding. Under both offices, residents are dealing with higher rates, a federally penalized wastewater system, an active inter-city lawsuit, and dueling multimillion-dollar infrastructure paths whose cost will land on the public.
