Good evening, everybody.

I'm uh Rob Schultz.

I lead the city city's utility department, and I want

to

on a high level just go over how we're paying for sanitary sewer and stormwaters today.

And uh this is to help the council uh for us to move forward with stormwater uh rules and ordinance change.

Uh one of the important things that I I want to make clear is that we're not setting any rates tonight and we're not changing any bills tonight, and so yeah.

Um tonight really is just about moving the ordinance forward.

Um the system is gonna need money either way.

We actually are trying to expedite the ordinance uh over what was proposed so that we cannot go forward with a 15% floor across the board increase.

Uh so we want to give council the option during the next budget cycle that they could keep the cost in the sewer bill, or we could move those costs over to a uh stormwater fee based on the hard surface area, so roofs, pavement, and every other things that are generating right

off.

So that's the choice is just keep it moving along, and we'll set the rates in that future.

Um, and those bills would only start once the entire program is done.

So

I want to kind of just quickly go over on a high level what what stormwater is.

So stormwater is any water that rains comes hits a roof, sidewalks, roadway, your own road, generating that, and it winds up in the city system, whether that's through drains, through a swale, through a stream, or rolls off into the harbor.

We fix all those pumps, pipes, we treat that rainwater before it reaches the bay, and we have to work to keep all that water clean.

We need to build and replace that system as we go, and the stormwater budget pays for a portion of that

work,

and what leaves that plant is clean, and we actually get criteria on what happens.

So, how did we get here?

Um, many of the northeast or older systems have combined systems, so they use one pipe to magically make everything disappear, and that's kind of why the sewer bill wound up paying for the majority of our stormwater cost.

We split the much of the system starting in the 70s, but some of that shared uh piping remains and and will remain.

And as we go through that,

the

federal grants helped a lot of that work was triggered in the 70s.

We've now made it through the focus from the sewer to getting to the stormwater.

We know stormwater is driving the water quality, flooding, and other impacts, and so as part of that long-term consent decree and the permits that we have, that's that transition point we're at now, and it makes sense to um start transitioning that.

Now, the major reason that we're looking to try to do this for July of 27 and not the July 1st of 28 as originally planned is the plant needed 20 million dollar bond.

That 20 million dollar bond came earlier, and so that money is is due sooner.

Um so who pays for rain today?

Any homeowner or business that uses water pays for it today.

It's hidden inside that water and sewer bill.

What doesn't pay or doesn't pay their share is anything that has a high impervious area.

It's oversimplified, but I'll use a paved lot.

Um that paved lot, say it's 24,000 square feet, and if it doesn't have that sewer or water account, it pays zero today.

And there's around a thousand of these accounts in the city.

So the thousand counts that are getting the benefit of that stormwater system that do not pay.

Um the other element of it is a few large accounts pay for most of the sewer charges, and it's it's inverted if you were look at any best practices.

This is not how you would want to set it up.

So the top five percent or around 470 of our accounts pay over 50 percent of the fee that we need to run that system around $8 million.

The next 5% pay another eight and a half, nine percent, and then the remaining 90% of the accounts only make up 38, 40 percent of of what we need.

And so it's a very narrow section of accounts that's really subject to quite a bit of changes.

No, the majority of them are going to be large water users.

If you were to look at our number one customer, it's actually Newport Housing.

Most of the estates in that actually don't meet that top 10%.

They would fall in the bottom 90%.

And so we've done a number of different presentations.

And this isn't again, we're kind of a moving target.

We don't know what the bond rate is.

We have some projections.

We don't know what some of the new contract stuff will be.

So we're looking at at ranges for that.

But basically, a low water using account with less roof and pavement would pay a little more.

If you had more roof and pavement, you'd pay quite a bit

more.

And so that's making up that difference.

If you had a typical, and there's no really no such thing as a typical, but say you use 3,000 gallons a month, which would be near our average for for a home, you'd actually probably pay slightly less or equal to what you're paying today.

And if you were a large water user, but in a typical home, you'd pay less because we're shifting that over, trying to recover those stormwater costs with what's driving them, and using that impervious area as a as a gauge.