By Lindy J. Gwinn, Mountain Valley News staff
Trustees in Cedaredge have beenworking onwhat they say is a fair and equitable way to increase water rates across the board in order to match revenues to the cost of water delivery.
Currently, there is a projected shortfall of just over $200,000 for 2010.
Residential water users on the Cedaredge lines are currently paying a $16.50 base fee for up to 10,000 gallons. The fee for overage above 10,000 gallons is being charged at $1.50 per thousand gallons.
Presently, there is no provision in the code that allows the town to raise rates to absorb inflation costs.
The town’s staff and trustees have been working for months on number scenarios that would allow them to find the appropriate rate increases to meet the cost of water delivery and maintenance. The top four of these scenarioswere discussed at the town board work session onMay 13th.
The proposals included ideas to increase the base fee an additional one to six dollars, reduce the amount of water delivered for that base fee or increase the overage charge in additional amounts from as little as one dollar to a maximum of four dollars.
Trustees looked at variations for each proposal and weighed the pros and cons. They discussed at length the varying opinions of each trustee.
Trustee Clayton Ryan immediately went to bat on behalf of residents,warning that whatever increases were decided upon, trustees had an obligation tomake sure that they were not raising rates to a point that homeowners could not afford and that the impacts to residents needed to be considered.
“We have to be careful here. People are struggling just to pay their mortgages. We don’t want to throw a huge increase at them and have them not be able to pay the bill. We also don’t want this to be so restrictive that we have a town of brown lawns either. Yes, we do have to raise the rates, but we need to make sure that we are doing this in a way that people understand and that we can justify and show why we are doing this,” said Ryan.
When discussing the overage fees, particularly as it pertained to businesses, Trustee Gene Welch jumped in. Some of these proposals ask to increase the cost of the overage from $1.50 to three dollars.
“So this would feasibly double my water bill. I am paying two hundred a month now and this would jump my bill to four hundred a month. I’m telling you now I can’t afford this. I think that this would be a very negative impact on the businesses we have here in town and I don’t think that, when we are struggling for sales tax revenue, we ought to penalize business this way.”
As the discussion continued, trustees began to favor raising only the base fee, and not look so hard at the overage fee increases.
Numbers from $17.50 to $28 started being discussed around the table. Town Intern Mitch Meyers said that he had spoken to towns of similar size and said that their base rates were considerably higher than the Town of Cedaredge.
Trustee Larry Smith, new to the board, said, “Well, this is a business, and we just need to raise those fees to match the expense. What would raising the base to $28 do for us? Would that get us there? We are loosing in the neighborhood of $190,000 a year, we need to get that back in revenue.”
Town Administrator, Katie Sickles told Smith that $60, 000 of that money goes toward paying the golf course for the water rights that the town bought from them. She also explained that, if the trustees built into an ordinance an inflation increase, that it would help slow the bleeding to the water costs.
In the end, trustees seemed to be leaning toward setting the base fee at $21 for 10,000 gallons, and leaving the overage fee at $1.50 per thousand gallons.
Ryan again spoke on behalf of residents. “We need to do this is increments annually, I think.”
Mayor, Pat Means said, “If we increase this base fee, it will take us longer to get out of the red, but we will get there. The point right now is to start moving in the right direction and cut the losses down. I think that in four or five years we can get where we are trying to go with this.”
Sickles reminded trustees that currently people are not only paying the base and overage fees but they are also paying four dollars for capital improvement to service a loan at Bank of the West, and eight dollars to service a debt on the new water lines to USDA. There is also a proposed four-dollar fee for future capitol improvements to be placed in a line item fund for future water infrastructure repairs, and line replacements. “We would like to have some money saved for those things rather than going in debt like we had to with the large water line project,” said Sickles.
