The Rock Springs City Council met on August 13, 2026, to receive a presentation from Todd Cristiano of RAF Tellis on the water, wastewater, and stormwater financial plan and rate structure study. The presentation summarized a 10-year financial forecast, proposed changes to water and sewer rate structures (shifting from declining to increasing block rates for water), and a conceptual stormwater fee analysis. Council members asked questions about equity and implementation, and expressed general support for moving forward with rate restructuring.
Public is that we've said the Pledge of Allegiance, and we're now on to the roll call. Counselor Thompson, Malonus. Here. Demas. Here. Vickerson. Zavi. Here. Hansen. Here. Pedri. Here. Bingham. Mayor Mickelson. Here. And with that, uh, I would invite Raf Tellis up to give us their presentation. Uh, Mayor, members of council, good afternoon. My name is Todd Cristiano with RAF Tellis. And today's discussion is a summary of what we've been working on over the past year since we came to you back last August to talk about the water, wastewater, and stormwater financial plan cash flow and rate study. Uh today's focus is about um the rates or the rate design, the rate structures. But we're going to take a little trip down memory lane here. How do I get this thing to move? Does the maybe it's a lot. Oh, there's the okay. Um as we get started, there was really three components to this study. Um we had our financial plan, which is developed in the cash flow, tells us what amount of revenue do we need each year to fund our capital improvement program, our operations and maintenance expense, meter reserve targets, and all the other financial metrics. Um the second and third part here is kind of what we're talking about today, this cost of service and rate design. Really, we wanted to make sure that these two processes tell us uh how we can uh assign cost proportionally to the various customer classes you have, and then from that design rates are going to recover those costs both in water and and wastewater. Um whoops, I'll have to go back up. Um so a quick summary on the water utility financial forecast. Um council approved a 7% annual re uh 7% annual revenue adjustment at the previous meeting. We're funding about 40 million dollars in um capital improvements with cash. We don't have any uh SPT funding in our scenario analysis. Um we're able to, with those revenue adjustments, able to meet our target reserve of 90 days of operations and maintenance expense and our capital reserve as well, and obviously meets our debt service coverage requirement for any debt that we're going to issue over the study period. So this just um was a way of adjusting revenues to make sure we sustained our financial health over the 10-year period for the water utility. And this is what this looks like from a graphical standpoint. Uh the bars here, the different colored bars uh just represent the type of expenditures you have. Um the light blue bar just indicates if you did not have any revenue adjustments, and what that shows us is that your expenditures would be higher uh than the revenue you're taking in, and that's why we had proposed those revenue adjustments, and that's what the black line shows that over the 10-year period, those cumulative impacts of those revenue adjustments will help fund those annual expenditures and meet your uh debt service coverage and and reserve targets. Um here's a quick survey of where we are with Rock Springs. Um this 6131 here for water is based off of 1200 cubic feet, three-quarter inch customer, very typical customer. Um this is the $61.31 cents resulting from the new rate structure that we have developed. And I'll go into details about what that rate structure is. So still kind of in the middle there. Um, of course, we have other communities that might be adjusting their rates for 2027 that are not published yet. So it's possible that you know the rockspurn rock springs bar could could move down or or up a little bit. Uh sewer utility financial forecast, very similar story to water. Um the only difference here is it's a nine percent annual revenue adjustment. Again, no uh SPT funding. We're achieving all of our reserve targets, both OM and capital. Um, and we're able to maintain our uh debt service coverage retarget during the 10-year period.