Politics & Government

City Set to Make Case for Sewer Rate Hike

Council is expected to authorize notification tonight that sewer rates will more than double next year; public workshop and hearing to follow.

Confronted with aging sewer pipes, rising costs, heightened environmental regulations and not enough money to pay for it all, city officials are set to make their case starting tonight for more than doubling local sewer rates.

At its meeting at tonight, the City Council is expected to authorize a mailer that will go out to all 6,700 customers within city limits, notifying them of the proposed rate increase. The notification calls for the annual sewer rate to jump to $694 on 2011-2012 property tax bills, a nearly 134 percent jump from the current $297 a year.

Under the plan, rates would continue to rise over the next four years, to $757 (9 percent jump) in 2012-2013, $784 (3.6 percent) in 2013-2014, $792 (1 percent) in 2014-2015 and $827 (4.4 percent) in 2015-2016. By the final year, the rate would have increased 178 percent rom the current $297.

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At , councilmembers acknowledged that those were steep hikes, but said they could rely on the fact that Mill Valley’s sewer rates have paled in comparison to many towns and cities in Marin since rates were last raised in 2004.

For example, Mill Valley’s annual residential rate of $297 is lower than all five of its fellow member agencies in the (SASM), the joint powers authority that for approximately 28,000 local residents. Mill Valley’s current rate is at least $100 less than each of them, and a whopping $717 less than ratepayers of the .

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“It will be a shock to a lot of people to see their bill get doubled,” Councilman Andy Berman said of Mill Valley residents. “But we’re not in a vacuum here. All six (SASM) member agencies are doing the same thing as a result of SASM raising its rates.”

Once the notice goes out to residents, ratepayers will have 45 days to protest the proposed increase in writing. If a majority of ratepayers submit written protests, the city won’t be able to go forward with the proposed rate increase under Proposition 218, which was passed in 1996.

A public hearing will be held on June 6 at 7:30 p.m. at City Hall, after the protest period. Three weeks before that hearing, the city is hosting a public workshop on May 17 at 6 p.m. to make its case as to why the rate hike is needed.

While there are several reasons for the city’s proposed rate hike, the primary one is the estimated $13 million it will cost to upgrade the city’s sewer system over the next five years, a figure that dwarfs the $550,000 a year the city has been spending on sewer system repairs in recent years.

The sewer overhaul became a priority in the wake of a January 2008 SASM spill that sent nearly 2.5 million gallons of sewage into Pickleweed Inlet in Richardson Bay and resulted in $1.6 million in fines from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The EPA’s investigation of the January 2008 spill determined that it was caused in part by “excessive infiltration and inflow,” when groundwater and stormwater seep into sewer pipes, adding to the burden placed on sewer pipes and increasing the likelihood of breakage in the system. 

Under a mandate from the EPA, the city did a video-based inspection of 12.6 miles of its 59 total miles of sewer lines as a basis for determining a sewer repair plan. The survey found the system to be laden with a variety of defects, including cracks, holes, blockages and tree root intrusion.

The majority of the city’s sewer pipes were installed more than 50 years ago and are primarily three- to four-foot sections of vitrified clay pipe, making them both brittle and laden with joints that connect one small section to another. Those joints are susceptible to intrusion from groundwater as well as tree roots, according to interim Public Works Director Jill Barnes.

In addition to the fine, the 2008 spill resulted in a strict compliance order from the EPA that dictates what SASM and its member agencies must do to get the system in order. The city was required to implement a sewage spill reduction plan. That plan has reduced sewage overflows by 68 percent since 2008, Barnes said, although a slope failure caused a sewer pipe to break on April 8 in the area of West Blithedale and Marguerite avenues. The resulting spill sent approximately 200 gallons of sewage into the Arroyo Corte Madera del Presidio Creek. The city said it has since cleaned up the spill.

Unlike SASM’s commercial customers, residential sewer customers all pay a flat fee regardless of the amount of wastewater they produce. The council in March discussed the idea of moving towards a “flow-based” rate system for residences but decided to hold off on such a move until at least next year.

John Farnkopf, one of the city’s consultants on the sewer rate hike, said that the majority of customers would actually see a rate decrease in a flow-based system, but that the highest water users would see a substantial increase.

“There are not as many really high water users,” he said. “But there is a disproportionate amount of water use from the highest-using customers.”

Such a move is complex, city officials said. It would involve compiling residential meter data from the Marin Municipal Water District (MMWD) and matching it with parcel numbers on the tax rolls. Individual sewer charges would then be calculated by estimating waste discharge based on each parcel’s metered water use.

Because of the complexity of such a move and the need to get a rate increase in place right away, the council elected to delay changing to a flow-based system until next year.

The council also put off the possibility of using debt financing to pay for the infrastructure overhaul, a move that would have lowered the rate increase in the short term but cost more in the long run. The council held out the possibility that it could go out for a bond measure to pay for more sewer infrastructure upgrades either during or after the five-year sewer rate hike.

“We’re all dealing with the issue of what is our appetite to take to the public,” Berman said. “We can only bite off so much right now.”

“We need to determine what is necessary for our system to be healthy,” City Manager Jim McCann said. “There are lots of needs. There is a certain amount of magic to it.”


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