Flat-rate charges would make way for charges based on water use
By: Greg Forester
MONTGOMERY Montgomery residents who have been urging the township to develop a new sewer fee system might be smiling soon as officials Thursday moved forward with what they call a more equitable system.
The new consumption-based billing plan being evaluated at Thursday’s township committee meeting would charge households a fee based upon their water usage, rather than the current system in which a household is charged the same no matter how much water is used.
"This plan will address something that people in Montgomery have wanted for a long time," said Mayor Cecilia Birge. "The new system we are evaluating would be more equitable and would encourage water conservation."
The usage-based system would include the calculated fee, plus an administrative fee charged to offset the costs of the greater work required in evaluating every single location’s water usage.
The current system utilizes a flat $600 fee per household, with non-residential and atypical dwellings being billed on their capacity divided by the flow assigned to a typical residential unit.
The flat fee creates a situation where households with dramatically different compositions and correspondingly different water usage pay the same amount for sewer service.
Based on examples presented at Thursday’s committee meeting, officials hope the new system would help residents using less water incur lower fees to use the township’s sewer services.
"The objective of this project was to develop a way to encourage conservation while billing people more if they used more water," said Township Administrator Donato Nieman. "I believe this plan meets those objectives." The examples presented Thursday, based on usage numbers from 2005, said units would be charged a $100 administrative fee per meter used, and units using a relatively lower amount of water, around 60 gallons a day, would receive a water-usage fee of around $210.
This, coupled with the administrative fee, would result in total charges nearly $300 less than the $600 flat fee.
Higher water usage received greater fees, from around $600 for medium usage of 275 gallons per day, up to $1,925 for extremely high usage of around 1,000 gallons per day.
Although the flat fee has advantages, including ease of administration and an easily predictable revenue stream, it continues to draw the ire of some residents, especially empty-nesters and senior citizens.
Some senior citizen residents at Thursday’s Township Committee meeting said they were happy to hear the township was finally taking action on something that they said had been promised to them for many years.
"We’re subsidizing families in the township, and paying the same fee for two people as families of four, five or more are paying," said one Montgomery senior at Thursday’s meeting.
Even Mayor Birge, a mother of four, admitted the current system created the possibility of two-person households in Montgomery subsidizing her family’s higher water usage.
The new fee plan would solve financial problems for some residents, but it could create other challenges, especially for those with water systems relying on well water, or those who irrigate parts of their property during the year.
A family using well water and Montgomery’s sewer system would require some sort of estimate for its total water usage in order to arrive at the proper fee for the sewer, township officials said.
Residents using irrigation for their properties would have to get another meter to measure the water used for irrigation, lest they be charged enormous fees for water flow not even entering the sanitary sewer.
Some committee members said they needed to ensure a way for savings to reach citizens living in multiple-family structures, like apartments and condominiums which tend to have a single meter attached to many units.
Committeeman John Warms said a plan needed to be developed to ensure renters would receive the savings from their landlords.
The group of township officials making the presentation gave the Township Committee a recommended schedule of implementation, with an ordinance this year followed by public outreach and attempts to work out the challenges the new plan will bring.
Water usage data would be collected in 2008 to form a basis for the program, and then the new system would be in use by 2009.