WPCA Nixes Plans To Change Billing

November 5, 2009 by Josh Morgan

After considering a few different alternatives to billing homeowners for use of the Town’s sewer system, the Water Pollution Control Authority decided to keep the current flat rate fee for all residential users.
The fee remains unchanged at $315 for the year, and commercial and industrial users will still be charged based on their usage. The Authority believed that not increasing the fee was important, given the economy, but it had looked at alternative billing methods for the last year. For a while, the Authority had struggled with a more equitable way to bill sewer users, as a single person is charged the same as a family of five.
WPCA Chairman John Attwood said the Authority looked into consumption-based billing by obtaining data from the Regional Water Authority. Currently, businesses have meters on their pipes that measure what is being sent to the treatment plant and are then billed accordingly. It would be an impossibility to put a meter on every residential home in Cheshire, so Attwood explained that bills could be crafted based on past water usage. In the end, however, the price tag for switching over would have been more costly to residents.
“The perfect way to measure is to meter what leaves a home, but we also talked about getting access to the water data from the RWA,” Attwood said. “They could have done the billing or we could have paid for the data and done the billing, but there were exorbitant fees. It would have added at least 15 percent to our budget.”
The Authority then discussed the possibility of billing based on the number of fixtures in the home, but that idea was short lived. Attwood explained that, just because a house has three bathrooms, it does not mean it is putting more strain on the system than a house with a single bathroom and the charges should not be based on that.
“The Town is really unable to cost-effectively manage the data,” Attwood said. “It’s hard for the WPCA to justify spending hundreds of thousands of dollars just to link to a water-based solution. It would add so many fees.”
Director of Public Works Joseph Michelangelo stated that around $2.5 million is raised annually through both residential and commercial sewer fees. Right now, the Town collects the roughly 400 commercial customers’ data from the RWA and handles the billing in-house for those accounts. However, if the Town wanted to add residents, it would be “12-fold and would take much longer” to accomplish.
“This would be like taking one step forward, but two steps back,” Michelangelo said. “Some costs would increase, but we wouldn’t raise any more income. We actually would raise less.”
Attwood emphasized that the sewer user fees are collected to help pay for day-to-day operations at the plant. Capital improvements, such as new equipment and upgrades, are funded separately through tax dollars, most of which have to be approved at referendum.
Michelangelo said the WPCA has formed a three-person subcommittee to look at how capital projects are funded and planned out. Right now, the multi-million dollar projects are funded through tax dollars, regardless if someone is connected to the sewer or has their own septic system.
“The big factor for capital projects is to decide if they are part of general taxation or user fees,” Michelangelo said. “Literally, that is the million dollar question.”
While the Phase 1 facilities plan has been completed, the Town is still a few months away from completing Phase 2. The first phase focused on capacity and usage, while predicting future growth in town. It was completed a year ago and was sent to the Department of Environmental Protection, but it has yet to gain formal approval from the state. The document outlines projected flows around town based on zoning maps. It also takes into account residential and commercial expansion in Cheshire. Michelangelo explained that small changes that were not accounted for would not “make or break” the plant, but if there were 20 small changes, “it makes it real hard” to design and plan for the future.
“If the Town grows as we expect it to grow, our plant will suffice,” Michelangelo said. “If the rate goes outside of what we planned, it throws everything out of whack.”
The second phase deals with the plant and what upgrades will be needed in future years. Michelangelo said it is “tough to predict” actual costs without doing design estimates first.
Attwood explained that all the cost estimates are “very big numbers” and expected the debt service to continue to grow while the Town replaces or upgrades “very old infrastructure.” He hoped that the Town Council, Planning and Zoning Commission, and the Water Pollution Control Authority would be able to work together to formulate a “plan for the future.”
“If we can manage our existing resources correct, we shouldn’t have to add a larger plant, but we need to manage that as a whole town,” Attwood said. “It isn’t just the WPCA, it needs to be a town-wide strategic plan. Things can add up and, at the end of the day, we cannot turn the plant off.”