Columbus City Utilities will have a special meeting Thursday to discuss a proposed rate increase for the city water utility.
The meeting will be held at 1 p.m. in the Cal Brand Meeting Room at Columbus City Hall. It is open to the public, but social distancing will be observed.
City utilities staff will go over the background and the needs for the proposed rate increase, utilities Executive Director Scott Dompke said. “And we will show what the rates will be proposed in our tiered rate structure. And the tiered rate structure charges you less per thousand gallons the more that you consume.”
The utilities board will vote on the proposal at an 11:30 a.m. July 16 meeting, deciding whether to move the rate case forward to the Columbus City Council.
Dompke said that the July 16 meeting is open to the public, although the location has not yet been set. It could be in the Cal Brand meeting room at City Hall or at the utilities building on McClure Road.
The rate petition, if approved by city council, could be filed with the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission around mid-August. If the commission approves the rate increase, it could take effect around August 2021.
The rate increase is intended to help fund operations, maintenance, and upgrading of aging infrastructure and capital project needs, Dompke said.
According to a comparative study by the Accelerate Indiana Municipalities, the average monthly rate for 4,000 gallons of water from a utility in Indiana is $28.89, whereas the current monthly rate for Columbus customers is $9.82.
Dompke said in June that due to the tiered rate structure of Columbus’s drinking water utility, not every customer will see the same level of increase across the board.
Without a water rate increase, the city will likely face more problems with its water infrastructure, Dompke told city utilities board members at the June meeting.
“We’ll end up spending more money on emergency repairs and less on preventative maintenance,” he said. He also noted that maintenance is a means of reducing “the long-term costs of operation” and that the more projects are delayed, the more they end up costing.
“This has been in the works for many years,” Dompke said. “And while the timing is less than ideal, it is something we cannot avoid any longer.”
Since Columbus’s last water rate increase in 1992, the city’s population has increased by 50%, the city utilities director said. The water utility has seen a 12% decrease in revenue since 1995 while at the same time seeing a 26% increase in operating expenses over that same time period.
According to Dompke, projects that would be funded by the rate increase include:
A 20-year water main replacement program
Building new wells (two are currently under construction, four are scheduled to be built in 2022, and one collector well is proposed to be installed around 2026)
Adding raw storage tanks
“The drivers for this rate increase are 86% capital driven,” he said of the rate increase request. The other 14% is for a need for operating expenses.
“The capital required, associated with this rate case, is $31 million,” Dompke said. “ (Of that) $22 million will come from bonds, and $5 million of that will come through the rates. We’ll target about $1.7 million a year through the rates.”
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What: Columbus City Utilities Board meeting
When: 1 p.m. Thursday
Where: Cal Brand Meeting Room, Columbus City Hall, 123 Washington St.
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