Waynesville City Council members voted during their April 17 meeting to hike rates charged to the Pulaski County Sewer District for treating sewage from customers outside the city limits.
“I believe the sewer district will be happy with that,” said Utility Committee Chairman Pat Howe. “It could have been a lot more, but we decided that we were going to be as fair with them as we were with the people living here in Waynesville.”
The city rate hike to the sewer district primarily affects service to residents of the Hunters Point and Seven Hills subdivisions, where the sewer lines running to private homes are owned by the sewer district but empty into the city’s treatment plants because the sewer district doesn’t have any nearby facilities to treat sewage. Based on an earlier recommendation from the Waynesville Utility Committee, council members adopted an ordinance requiring payment of $2.44 per thousand gallons of wastewater flowing into the city treatment facility and a $13 minimum monthly charge per customer.
That’s a significant increase from the current rate of $1.45 per thousand gallons and $8.25 minimum monthly charge per customer, but Howe reminded Waynesville council members that the committee had considered other rates. Other options considered but rejected included:
• $1.80 per thousand gallons, which is 10 percent above the city’s cost without capital costs, and a $12.50 minimum monthly charge per customer,
• a $15 flat fee per sewer district customer, or
• $2.44 per thousand gallons, which is half the sewer district’s rate to its own customers, and a $10 minimum monthly charge per customer.
All of those proposed rates are higher than what the city charges its own residents but lower than what the sewer district charges its customers.
Waynesville’s current rates to its residents are a minimum charge of $7.50 for the first thousand gallons and $1.40 per thousand gallons thereafter; the minimum will increase on Aug. 1 to $8. Special rates apply to residents if neighborhood improvement districts who pay a $13 flat rate that will increase to $13.50 in August; customers outside the city limits pay a flat $25 flat rate.
According to background information presented by City Administrator Bruce Harrill, the sewer district’s rates to its own customers are based on water consumption and are $4.88 per thousand gallons with a $16.79 monthly service fee. However, the sewer district board members recently decided to revert to a flat rate for Hunters’ Point residents due to a billing dispute with Laughlin family members who developed the subdivision and continue to run a private water supply service to its residents. The same decision also applies to other areas where the sewer district can’t obtain water usage readings, either because the water service isn’t metered or because the owner of the water service won’t turn over billing records.
The rate increase to the sewer district is part of an ongoing review of Waynesville utility rates to maintain a system that cost the city $606,000 to run from April 2007 to March 2008, including $165,743 in capital improvements, $287,485 in general sewer system expenses and $153,071 in plant expenses to treat an average of 736,000 gallons of sewage per day.
There’s been a long history of billing disputes between the city and sewer district. A letter by Harrill to city council members noted that “one of the major problems has been in identifying the number of sewer district customers that our system serves.”
Harrill’s letter singled out two areas — Hunters’ Point and Seven Hills.
“For several years the sewer district claimed they were serving 300 to 400 customers in (the Hunters’ Point) area, in contradiction to our own surveys that around 600 customers were served,” Harrill wrote. “Recently in 2007, sewer district officials recognized their billing error and we now bill them for that approximate number of customers.”
Harrill wrote that he felt the situation had improved in the past few years but was “not confident that all problems have been solved or may not occur again.”
Howe provided more detail than Harrill about the Seven Hills billing problems and publicly thanked Cecil Greer, an area resident who Howe said deserves credit for alerting the city to serious issues.
“When I first got on the city council and was appointed to the utility committee, Mr. Greer brought it to my attention that something didn’t add up about the sewer flow coming from the Seven Hills area,” Howe said. “He said that what the flow meter and they were saying was too low of a water usage up there; we had less sewer coming in than they had water out there. It took quite a few years to finally figure out what it was. A lot of it was there was an extra sewer line put in that bypassed this flow meter.”
“When it was put in and by who I don’t know, but Mr. Greer was correct that we were getting a lot of extra sewage that no one claimed responsibility for,” Howe said.
The problems with the sewer district aren’t over, Howe warned.
“The sewer district claims that they have no inflow and infiltration from rainwater on their lines,” Howe said. “During these rains, Superintendent Graves took me down and showed me the pipe where the flow from the city of Waynesville comes into the plant and the flow from Seven Hills … I stood there and I watched that flow coming from our pipe and their pipe, and their flow matches ours. Now I would remind everybody that they have what, roughly 200 to 250 customers, and we’ve got 1,500 or so customers here. I believe they do have some infiltration of their lines down there.”
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