By Susan Motander
On Tuesday night, the Monrovia City Council voted to set a hearing on the issue of raising sewer and water charges as a means of funding the renovation of the city’s water and sewage systems. The renovations are part of a larger, citywide Capital Improvements Project called Monrovia Renewal. This program would replace all the old outdated sewer and water lines and would repair or replace the substandard roads in the city. The entire cost of this major Capital Improvement Project (CIP) will be $51.7 million.
Funding for the water and sewer portions of this CIP is proposed to come from bonds paid for by the proposed water and sewer rate and charges increases. More details on the CIP can be found as an attachment to the staff report on AR-2 (Administrative Report 2). To find this on the city web site, go to the Government section of the home page. Click on it and then on agendas and staff reports. Then scroll down to the “view details” for the August 4 City Council meeting.
Proposition 218 mandates that a public hearing be held regarding rate hikes on utilities. According to City Attorney Craig Steele, notices of the public hearing need to be mailed to every property owner in the city regarding the fee increases. Anyone receiving a notice can file a protest of the increase. These protests do not need to be made in person at the hearing, but can be given any time before the close of the hearing which is scheduled for Oct. 6, 2015. He also explained that if 50% +1 of the property owners objected, the council would be prevented from raising the rates.
As the staff report on the issue made clear, the funds generated from the rate increase would enable the city to procure bonds to affect the repairs required. The total estimated cost for the water system repairs is $23,258,000. Those for sewer repair are $13,647,038. The city’s Director of Public Services, Tina Cherry, also reported that the amount of the fee increase for water for the average family would be approximately $10 per month with an additional fee increase of $4 per month in sewage fees.
According to the staff report “the new water rate structure could generate between $1.5 million to $1.8 million per year in new revenues, which would be used in a financing program to potentially generate around $24 million to use toward water system capital improvement as outlined in the Monrovia Renewal Capital Improvement Program.”
Cherry said that the notices of the proposed rate increase would be sent out before Aug. 22, 2015.
In subsequent matters on the agenda, the city council also voted to hire Merrell-Johnson and Civiltech Engineering to engineer and design the street, water line and sewer line repairs for the southeast and southwest sections of the city, Phase I of the proposed Monrovia Renewal Project.
Council Member Becky Shevlin asked if this was not premature as the city did not yet have the funds (which would be generated by the rate increases) to fund the actual projects for which these companies were being hired to prepare the designs. She was reassured by City Manager Oliver Chi that this work was required whether the rate increase was approved or not.
The southeast and southwest sections of the city a designated in the Monrovia Renewal project consist of the area between Colorado on the north, the 210 Freeway on the south, and the city boundaries on the east and west.
