The committee of the whole finance administration and communications for Wednesday, November 12th.

Council members in attendance are Councilmember Nueva Kamina, Stewart, Forsyth online.

We have Kritzer and Fields.

If other council members show up, I will announce them as they arrive.

We have six items on the agenda for this meeting.

First up is the adoption of a resolution updating the water and wastewater connection charges and adoption of an ordinance updating the stormwater capital facilities charges.

I will hand it off.

Thank you very much.

Our financial planning manager, Haley Zercher has been working very closely with our public works engineering staff as well as our rate consultant FCS group to walk through or work through the update of these fees and hand it over to her at this time to let her uh go over the item.

All right, thank you.

Uh good evening.

Um so as mentioned, we're proposing an update to our capital facilities charges and uh connection fees.

So these are our one-time charges applied to new development as a condition of connecting to the utility infrastructure.

Um Redmond currently charges connection fees for water and for wastewater, and then our capital facility charges for stormwater, and we are proposing updates to all of these.

Um it is best practice for these charges to be reviewed and updated every two years.

Um, the last time we have brought an update forward was 2018.

Uh, so we are a little bit overdue for what something like this.

Uh so naturally we have been working with um FCS to get these charges updated.

Um so before I jump in on updating um or on the the updates to the charges, I just wanted to note that the analysis does include a little bit of a change to the calculation methodology.

Um right now we charge, we have two different methodologies, one for the water and wastewater utility and one for stormwater, and we are just proposing um that we use the same methodology across all of the utilities.

Um currently what it looks like for the water and wastewater is we take the existing costs of the system plus future expansion costs divided by total system capacity.

Um, and what we are proposing is to do the total system cost divided by the total system capacity.

The difference there is that we're including the cost of uh replacement and repair projects, not just um expansion related CIP projects.

So that's just we're just proposing to be a little bit more consistent across all utilities, um, and it aligns with best practice for these charges.

Um for the updates um uh kind of across the board, we're seeing mostly increases, which is expected because we're using an updated cost basis.

So the projects that are included in the cost basis are all of our CIP projects for the utility.

Um, so we're seeing increased costs uh on those.

So naturally we'd expect some increases across the board.

Um, we are seeing uh an increase to single or on the water side, we're seeing um increases to the single family residential connection charges and commercial charges uh are for meters one inch and smaller, and then all other water connection charges we're actually seeing a decrease.

Um, and that is mostly due to the increase is again due to the increase in cost basis, but the decrease is related to the methodology of how costs related to fire suppression are recovered from these connections.

So they're based off of land use rather than meter size.

Um, so that's why we see a decrease on some of the larger meters.

Um the wastewater connection charges are a little bit more um straightforward.

We're seeing increases across the board, which is what we expect with an increased cost basis.

Um, and then on the stormwater side, uh, so we do have three separate charges for stormwater based off of location.

We have the citywide system and then charges for the overlake and downtown subbasins.

Um we are seeing an increase, a slight increase to the uh citywide charges, and again, that's due to the cost basis.

We have an updated capital facilities or a capital plan that we're using, so that's why we see those.

Um we do see a slight decrease in our overlake charges due to an increase in the number of impervious units that we're estimating.

So that's the denominator of the capital facilities charge.

Um, and then we do see a pretty significant decrease on the downtown charges.

That's also that's actually due to a decrease in our cost basis, which is just another reason why it's important that we are updating these regularly because as our plans change, um, we can see an increase, we can see a decrease.

We just want to make sure that we're making sure that our uh cost base is as accurate as possible.

Um so we have presented our findings to the one Redmond government affairs meeting on October 23rd to provide an opportunity for the business owners to be informed and ask questions before adoption.

Um that's kind of the really quick rundown of those.

Does anyone have any questions?

Great, thank you.

And I will announce uh councilmember Anderson has joined us.

And council, any questions on this item?

Councilmember Nueva Kamina.

Thank you.

Um, thank you for putting this together and for um taking a look at what what does it look like to be equitable along with the the regular check-ins and getting updated?

Um I just heard you I just want to confirm on the date uh when the presentation was made to one redmond.

Uh that was October 23rd.

And it was uh follow-up, if I may.

And it was so that we could hear some feedback back from the businesses.

Um what have we gotten any feedback back from them?

And if so, how did that go?

Um, well, a lot of the questions were related to just kind of logistical questions, and then we did get some questions around.

So, if you were to look at all of our uh capital facilities charges, we do have our water, uh a citywide water connection fee, and there is a regional capital facility charge for um Cascade Water Alliance.