Copperas Cove looking at utility rate increases totaling $5 per month

By BRITTANY FHOLER 
Cove Leader-Press 
 
The Copperas Cove City Council heard from the city’s Public Works Director and discussed utility rates for water, sewer and solid waste before proposing a $2 increase to the water and sewer base rates along with a previously proposed $1 increase to the solid waste rate during a Special Workshop meeting held Tuesday evening. 
Council members tossed around numbers, eventually agreeing that water rates, as well as the sewer rates, should increase from the base rate of $12 to $14 per month and removing an increase to the volumetric rate for the water rates that was originally proposed.

The volumetric rate for sewer actually decreases to $5.75 from $6. The residential solid waste collection fee would increase by $1, from $18 to $19, as originally proposed. 
This is a 16.7 percent increase to the base rates for water and sewer and a 5.6 percent increase to the solid waste rate.
The rate increases will add a projected $378,784 in additional revenue to the city’s Water and Sewer Fund. 
A resident who currently pays a total bill of $92.49 for 4,000 gallons of water would see their bill increase to $96.57, an increase of $4.08 with the new rates. 
During discussions, Interim Budget Director Ariana Beckman plugged in a $2 increase. While some council members questioned if that was sufficient, Mayor Bradi Diaz said she didn’t want to see the rate go up anymore. 
“I’m having trouble with this,” Diaz said. “I know we need to meet and need to be proactive, but I don’t want to keep hammering at our citizens.”
Council members Dan Yancey and Marc Payne agreed that these increases were necessary to be proactive and avoid more problems later. 
Public Works Director Scott Osburn walked council members through the problems, or “pressures” as he called them, facing the water, sewer and solid waste divisions, during a presentation that led to the above discussions.
“The way I see these enterprise funds are they’re businesses. They’re basically non-profit businesses that need to be treated like businesses,” Osburn said. “As the business grows, obviously expense and revenue should correspond to keep those businesses in the black, so to speak, move forward. The city faces unique challenges in relation to these businesses.    This is a perpetual business. Just like the city, the water and sewer need to be maintained indefinitely and obviously a lot of factors go into that. A lot of pressures really drive that business as we’re looking at it on a year to year basis.”
These “pressures” include looking at current needs regarding operators and workers, proactive maintenance needs, emergency procurements and inflation. 
“Every year, things go up whether that’s the cost of treated water from WCID, whether that’s materials, whether that’s the labor cost, CPI index averages 2-3 percent a year,” Osburn said. “If we are not keeping pace bare minimum with that inflation, we’re losing ground each year and it’s becoming more and more difficult to perpetually maintain and operate these systems.”
The city is also dealing with growth and development which brings more pressure. 
“We get X number of linear feet of sewer and water each year incident to these developments. We get additional lift stations,” Osburn said. “If we don’t have additional folks and materials to keep up with that maintenance, it becomes unsustainable, quite frankly.”
Osburn also touched on the aging infrastructure, which the city is addressing in its Capital Improvement projects. 
“The more maintenance I can do on the front end, the longer I can extend the useful life of those assets to avoid those big projects that quite frankly you need bonds to cover the cost of those,” he said. “If I don’t have the ability to proactively maintain the system, it puts the system in jeopardy. We face the catastrophic failures, the emergency purchases and in this area of the city, we also face potential non-compliance issues with TCEQ which potentially lead to your significant fines, and that’s just wasted money, in my opinion.”
Osburn showed the council what additional percentages added to the proposed rate would look like, with each additional percent raising about $125,000 in revenue, Osburn said. 
The additional revenue would help provide more people to maintain the systems as well as help with the concept of employee morale, he added. 
“The folks that work in these divisions consistently feel, and in most cases are, always subject to call back and that’s any time of day, any time of night, on holidays, so they’re in this consistent position of feeling like they’re on call 24-7, 365,” Osburn said.