RUMFORD — A public hearing is set for a new sewer rate formula that Town Manager George O’Keefe says will be more equitable for the estimated 3,100 users of the system.
The hearing will take place on Thursday, Aug. 1 in the Town Hall auditorium.
O’Keefe said the public hearing will serve not only to explain the new formula, but it’s also a proposed rate until it gets approved the Board of Selectmen, which will follow the hearing at their regular meeting on Aug. 1.
He added it will also allow the public a chance to provide input and have their say over “what a sewer rate will look like, and to understand why we’re looking at billing them the way that we are.”
O’Keefe said utilizing this new formula is “entirely normal throughout the rest of Maine. And that’s where we should be as a community. We should be following the standards for the rest of the state in terms of how we bill things. But that doesn’t mean we follow the rates throughout the rest of the state. But it does mean that we don’t operate a sewer system that allows people to overuse or use more and not pay their fair share for what they’re using.”
At their meeting on July 3, the Select Board approved increasing the sewer rate to $600 per unit, as well as a charge of 12.5 cents over and above the first 1,200 cubic feet per quarter.
O’Keefe said, “1,200 cubic feet per quarter represents the rough usage of a household of about 1.5 people. And what this will do is ensure that residents who pay their own sewer bill and are on the lowest possible level of usage will have the lowest possible sewer bill, where currently under our flat rate system, residents are effectively paying to cover the overuse of the sewer system by others.”
He noted, “We have the flow rate data from the mill and Rumford Power, and that’s giving us a rough idea of what their bill is going to look like, which then puts us in the position to set the sewer rate for everybody else, based on metered water. In some cases probably, there are a handful of people who are still on flat rate because they don’t have water district service.”
O’Keefe said this metered system “will allow us to more equitably spread the burden of operating the sewer system across the entire town. And it’s extremely important to understand the Rumford/Mexico Sewerage District provides us our assessment each year based on our actual flow.”
“And the result of that means that because we previously have been billing on a flat rate, if flows were increased, or if there were high flows from individual users, we had no mechanism to bill them for their higher use or overuse, as the case may be, of the sewer system,” he said.
Prior to the new formula, O’Keefe said everybody, collectively, was carrying all the other users who had higher flows. That could include multi-family units, a single-family home with there might be a lot of residents, and a lot of industrial customers as well.
“This will be a much more equitable system where people are actually paying really for the use of the sewer system,” he said.
O’Keefe said Rumford’s sewer rates will still be below average for the rest of Maine. “However, the most important thing is that this will allow us to handle a 21-percent increase in our assessment from the Rumford/Mexico Sewerage District without actually having to increase the rate on the largest and smallest users of the system,” he said.
O’Keefe said this, as opposed to the individuals who so far this year have been getting billed $150 per quarter or $300 for the half year, and then potentially facing a 21 percent increase next year. Those individuals appear unlikely to face an increase next year.
He indicated that this has been in progress for about four years because of the requirement to have a fiscal sustainability plan from DEP. “As part of the downtown project, that was one of the requirements. You had to do two things — you had to have a climate adaptation plan and a fiscal sustainability plan.”
O’Keefe said they worked very hard to ensure they came up with a rate that was as equitable as possible. “And so, for the first time, perhaps ever, we are not facing a billing system pursuer where users who push more flow into the system aren’t getting billed for what they’re putting into the system. “
He added, “That’s just as much of a concern on the multi-family side and our commercial user side, as it is on the industrial side. It’s a little bit of everything. Some of the commercial users may actually see their sewer bills go down because our current flat rate system tends to overbill some of them.”