City’s increase in water, sewer rates discussed at town hall PAGES

Local Government Meetings

New Buffalo Times

Democracy Requires Transparency

CITY OF NEW BUFFALO JOHN HUMPHREY, MAYOR CITY COUNCIL MARK ROBERTSON, ROGER LIJESKI, JOHN HUMPHREY, BRIAN FLANAGAN, VANCE PRICE City Council meets on the 3rd Monday of each month at 6:30PM CITY OF NEW BUFFALO PLANNING COMMISSION MEETINGS to be determined NEW BUFFALO TOWNSHIP BOARD PETE RAHM, MICHELLE HEIT, JUDY H. ZABICKI, PATTY IAZZETTO, JACK ROGERS Board meets on the 3rd Monday of each month at 7PM NEW BUFFALO TOWNSHIP PLANNING COMMISSION Meets on the 1st Tuesday of each month at 6:30PM

NEW BUFFALO AREA SCHOOLS BOARD FRANK MAGRO, LISA WERNER, HEATHER BLACK, DENISE CHURCHILL, BRADLEY BURNER, VANESSA THUN CHIKAMING TOWNSHIP CHIKAMING TOWNSHIP BOARD DAVID BUNTE, PAULA DUDIAK, LIZ RETTIG, RICHARD SULLIVAN, BILL MARSKE Chikaming Board meets on the 2nd Thursday of each month at 6:30PM CHIKAMING TOWNSHIP PLANNING COMMISSION Meets on the 1st Wednesday of each month at 6:30PM THREE OAKS THREE OAKS TOWNSHIP BOARD Meets on the 2nd Monday of each month at 7PM VILLAGE OF THREE OAKS BOARD Meets on the 2nd Wednesday of each month at 7PM GRAND BEACH Meets on the 3rd Wednesday of each month at 7PM MARY ROBERTSON, CLERK DEBORAH LINDLEY, BLAKE O’HALLORAN, JAMES BRACEWELL, PETER DOERR, PAUL LEONARD, JR. MICHIANA VILLAGE OF MICHIANA COUNCIL Meets on the 2nd Friday of each month at 1PM

City’s increase in water, sewer rates discussed at town hall

Concerns over the city of New Buffalo’s increasing water and sewer rates were hashed out during a town hall at city hall Tuesday, Nov. 22.

The Galien River Sanitary District (GRSD) Sewer Authority serves the communities of New Buffalo City, New Buffalo Township, Lake Township, Chikaming Township, City of Bridgman, and Weesaw Township.

New Buffalo Mayor John Humphrey said that the plant located on Kruger Road in New Buffalo Township has “costs to operate.”

“We are responsible for those costs and those costs go to you folks as your sewer bill,” he said.

Humphrey said there’s two numbers on customers’ bills: sewer usage (SU) and the Sewer ready to serve(SR). The SR, which is the cost of physically bringing a sewer pipe to residents’ homes to collect sewage and the system that brings it to the plant, has gone up due to the amount never having been “historically correctly updated at least as far back as we can go to 2003,” Humphrey said.

He said the costs of the plant continue to escalate due to the GRSD’s annual inflationary increase but those fixed costs the plant charges were “never properly increased.” For a long time, the plant had an “economic model” that was how much material was sent to the plant.

“We were billed on that because that amount of material sent to the plant and the billing for that was always enough to cover the entire cost of the operation of the plant,” Humphrey said.

The city tried to lower the cost by taking all the lake water out of the city’s system. Humphrey said that, at one point, 57% of

BY FRANCESCA SAGALA the city’s flow was lake water.

“We spent all that time cleaning that up and then all of a sudden, with our infiltration down, we have record low flows to the plant,” he said.

Soon, everyone’s flows weren’t paying the “actual cost of this giant plant to operate.”

‘So, we had a discussion on changing the economic model on how we can fix the plant and that made us address our long historical inaccuracies in keeping up to date with the cost we were billing everybody for our sewer fund,” Humphrey said.

The city council received a water and sewer rate study at a special meeting in April to “ensure sufficient rates to satisfy the financial obligations of the systems,” city manager Darwin Watson said. Rates charged for services vary based on the customers’ meter size. All customers pay the same rate for water and sewer usage.

In accordance with the city’s code of ordinances, the rates were set by the council in June and became effective Aug. 1, 2022.

Watson said water and sanitary sewer funds are considered enterprise funds that are used to account for operations that are financed and operated like private business enterprises, where “the intent is that the cost of providing goods and services to the general public on a continual basis be financed or recovered primarily through the user charges.”

“Water and sewer rates are based on the real cost of treating, delivering and removing water to and away from customers,” Watson said.

Andy Campbell, director of Baker Tilly, which worked with the city to determine the water rates, said the GRSD system has been planning for a multiple capital improvement project and the GRSD’s rate structure change in 2023, with Baker Tilly helping the city “plan for that with the city’s rates.”

He added that the city has had meter issues with the GRSD. The GRSD tries to “meter the amount of sewage that comes from each community, which is very difficult because the pipes aren’t under pressure so you can’t really meter that very well.”

The GRSD ran into this issue with the city in 2017; however, Campbell said he hopes it was cleaned up and that there are “some bad meters” on the GRSD side that he believes have since been addressed.

“A lot of that came into question about what was actually happening with the city’s system…We were kind of waiting for answers from the GRSD from the city, trying to get that all cleaned up because the numbers were just going all over the place over what was being paid to the GRSD and what was not being paid,” he said.

It’s now believed that the city has the correct numbers with regards to planning for the GRSD’s expenses, the city’s expenses and for capital improvements “on both sides.”

Campbell said all of this “gives us the best direction going forward with how to operate the fund in a self-sustaining manner.”

“The goal for the city because these are enterprise funds is to keep the money within the fund, so the rates go into each respective fund – you’re trying to run the fund so it’s self-supporting and not having to pull taxes or any other funds in to run the system,” he said.

Humphrey said the city has been subsidizing the sewer fund with the city’s monies from the general fund.

Moving forward, he said a healthy enterprise fund should allow the city to be more able “to absorb future fluctuations in rates without having to raise your sewer bill.”

Resident and business owner Marc Danesi asked why the rate increase couldn’t be spread out, such as by having it be raised 25% one year or 10% another, to allow a “chance for people to absorb it.”’

Humphrey said the city was advised “multiple times to raise the rates but the city council for whatever reason, decided not to do it.”

“It’s the unfortunate reality of being able to maintain and secure our cost of the plant – we got ourselves in a lot of trouble up there over the last situation where we were accused of not being able to pay our bills and we have to make sure our city is fiduciary responsible and we have a long record here of fuduciary irresponsibility in the management of our sewer fund and unfortunately as tax payers, we all have to pay for that now,” he said.

Campbell, who said that he recommended a large increase in 2017 after the city was awarded a SAW grant to do an inventory of the system and gather asset management plans for the sanitary and stormwater systems, said that there have been a “lot of changes at GRSD that have accumulated in those past five years.”

The city’s flow to the GRSD spiked in 2019 with the highwater table.

“Whatever amount of flow each of the five member communities sent to GRSD, they were charged a rate per 1,000 gallons and that was sent to the five communities and the rate was adjusted as the flow was adjusted,” he said.

“If all five communities raised or lowered their usage the same proportionally, everyone’s bills would be the same proportionally…The problem was the high-water table affected the city more than the four other communities so New Buffalo City’s bills proportionally regards to the other four communities went up,” Campbell added.

There was a dispute with the metering so the city ran a credit with GRSD, which “put it on the fact” that the city T couldn’t afford to pay them was what was being billed. “The problem now is you cannot wait any longer… The fund has been run to a point where if no rate increase was implemented, the fund was going to run to almost $0 at the end of this fiscal year,” Campbell said, adding that it was running a negative cash flow of $300,000. Robert Kemper, who owns two properties in the city and said he’s paying 10% of the total cost increase, said other municipalities subsidize sewer funds through their general funds.

“We’d been doing that for two years –it was a choice made by the city council to agree to increase this by $900,000 a year instead of continuing to subsidize it through the general fund…It’s a choice to use some of the general funds to say, ‘We have to ease into this, we cannot drop this bomb to the property owners in the city of New Buffalo,” he said.

Kemper questioned how much the tax collection has gone up in the last two to three years, and that the property values have gone

library to present ‘Prairies: Past, Present and

up significantly.

“So, the city general fund has also grown during that same time period,” Kemper said.

Campbell said that, since the Headlee Rollback and Proposal A “work against each other,” the city’s general fund isn’t “realizing that increase in taxes more than inflation every year.”

Watson said that, from 2017 to 2022, property tax increased from $2.3 million to $2.6 million.

“If we continue to subsidize, we’re now talking about laying off a police officer because a police officer cost us about $100,000 annually - it comes out of the general fund,” he said.

He added that, due to Headlee and Proposal A, “you’re going to have to start looking at your costs in other ways to subsidize your enterprise funds, which should basically fund itself.”

Free coats are available at New Troy Community Center

Thanks to the Friends of New Troy’s annual winter coat drive, which has caused a lot of generous people to open their closets and bring gently used coats to the New Troy Community Center, the center now has a wide selection of coats available. Anyone in need is invited to stop by the community center and select something. Items are located on a rack just outside the center entrance, which is accessible any time of day or night. Proof of income or residency is not required. If you have coats, boots, hats or mittens to donate, please place them on the rack. Center hours are from 4-6 p.m. Monday through Wednesday 10 a.m. to noon and Friday through Saturday. The New Troy Community Center is located at 13372 California Road in New Troy (across from the post office). For more information, please call the center at 269-426-3909. — STAFF REPORTS

New Buffalo Future’

Ryan Postema, executive director of Chikaming Open Lands, will present a program on native prairies at the New Buffalo Township Library at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Dec. 6, in the library’s Pokagon Room. Postema will review the history of native prairies in the Midwest and discuss their importance and efforts underway to restore and protect prairie communities. He will also share examples of nearby preserves that demonstrate prairie diversity. Postema’s deep knowledge of the area’s local environments and the plants and animals that populate them offers a terrific insight into the natural wonders of Southwest Michigan. Like all programs in the Friends of the New Buffalo Library’s Community Forum series, this presentation is free and open to all. The New Buffalo Township Library is located at 33 N. Thompson Street in downtown New Buffalo. — STAFF REPORTS

LETTERS TO THE NEW BUFFALO TIMES:

TOWN SQUARE

THE VIEWS HERE DO NOT REPRESENT THE VIEWS OF THE NEW BUFFALO TIMES. THE NEW BUFFALO TIMES ASKS THAT YOUR LETTER TO THE NEW BUFFALO TIMES, BE UNIQUE, KIND AND BASED ON REASONED FACTS. THE NEW BUFFALO TIMES RESERVES THE RIGHT TO NOT PUBLISH ANY CORRESPONDENCE FOR ANY REASON. PLEASE KEEP YOUR LETTERS TO 300 WORDS OR FEWER. PLEASE INCLUDE YOUR NAME, PHONE NUMBER AND YOUR EMAIL ADDRESS. PLEASE EMAIL YOUR LETTER TO INFO@NEWBUFFALOTIMES.COM. THANK YOU.

New Buffalo Times

LOCAL INTELLIGENCE — SINCE 1942 —

MANY THANKS...

Blessings in a Backpack would like to thank Barbara and Conrad Rieckhoff and the Sunset Shores Homeowner’s for their kindness and generosity in supporting Blessings in a Backpack in New Buffalo.

The Homeowner’s Association held another successful food drive in Sunset Shores on November 12 and provided over 1,600 individual food items to be distributed to the children in the Blessings in a Backpack program at New Buffalo Elementary School.

Blessings in a Backpack currently serves 88,900 students in 1,118 schools in 45 states. Last year Blessings in a Backpack provided 3,183,295 hunger free weekends to students across the United States.

We send food home every Friday with children who might not have enough food to eat on the weekends.

This ministry is made possible through generous donations from the community and many volunteer hours.

Thank you to all of the donors from our community for your support and generosity. It is greatly appreciated.

If you would like to make a monetary donation or would like more information about Blessings in a Backpack, please contact Mary Robertson at mrobertson58@comcast. net.