Agenda - Public Works Committee - 02/15/2000

Home

PW CASE UPDATE OF STORM WATER UTILITY IMPLEMENTATION By: Steve Jankowski, City Engineer Background: At the December 21, 1999 Public Works Committee meeting, a discussion was held on the details affecting the implementation of the storm water utility. Initially it was anticipated that the billing for the first quarter could be mailed in April. The adopted ordinance, however, was not published until February 4, 2000, and will not go into affect until March 6, 2000. The City Attorney has advised that billing should not be retroactive. Therefore, we will only be able to bill for 25 of the 91 days in the first quarter. It may be preferable to delay the first billing until the second quarter. The second purpose of this case is to present an update on the status of determining the charges for the non-residential customer. At the time of this writing, 150 non-residential customers have been identified. To determine the charge for these non-residential customers, parcel area and the percentage of area that is impervious needs to be calculated for each parcel. The area has been determined for 100 of the 150 parcels, however, only 50 parcels have completed the determination of impervious coverage. Staff believes that, with additional staff assigned to this task, the remaining parcels can have the calculations completed by March 1. We have been advised by Connexus, who perfonrts the City utility billing, that all information needs to be submitted to them by the first week of March. The final purpose of this case is to present issues that have arisen in the process of implementing the utility and seek direction or concurrence on policy to deal with these issues: 1) The majority of parcels 'have a single utility customer and address. How should multi- address and multi-tenant parcels be charged? In checking with other communities having storm water utilities, these parcels are usually billed to the property owner. The owner then is responsible for collecting from his tenants as he sees fit. This system will require a separate billing. We have identified 14 such customers. 2) According to the ordinance, no commercial customer would be charged a Residential Equivalent Factor (REF) less than 1.02. For very large properties, this can result in some unusually high monthly costs. For example, the Rum River Hills Golf Course contains 100 acres. Their monthly bill would be $1,020 under the formula. An alternative would be to use the percentage of paved area around only the clubhouse and parking area. In this case, an impervious factor of 86% calculated on the two acres encompassing the clubhouse would result in a monthly charge of $414. Similar situations are typical of the Gun Club, the Boy Scout Camp, The Links Golf Course, Green Valley Greenhouse, and Armstrong Kennels.