By Jay Ermis
Huntsville City Council member Jack Wagamon hopes a $2 reduction in the city’s minimum wastewater and water rates isn’t the last residents will see in upcoming months.
The City Council approved amending an ordinance by a 6-2 vote Tuesday night to reduce the minimum monthly charge for both by $2 for single-family residential.
Wagamon and council members Charles Forbus, Melissa Mahaffey, Dalene Zender, Tom Cole and Lanny Ray favored the reduction while Mayor J. Turner and council member Mac Woodward voted against lowering the rates.
The minimum monthly charge for the first 2,000 gallons of wastewater will drop from $15 to $13.
The minimum monthly charge for the first 3,000 gallons of water used will also drop by $2, but it also depends on the meter size.
The charge for a three-quarter-inch meter is $15 and that will drop to $13.
The current minimum monthly charge for a 1-inch meter is $21; $27 for 1.5-inch; $43.50 for 2-inch; $165 for 3-inch; $210 for 4-inch; $315 for 6-inch; and $435 for 8-inch. Those will decline by $2 each.
The reductions will result in the city losing $360,000 — $180,000 in sewer funds and $180,000 in water funds — but Wagamon said Friday the loss “is a drop in the swimming pool.”
Turner said the city has $3.1 million reserve in water funds, but the city plans to pay on a $2 million bond and faces a possible $600,000 bill to repair a water well, but council members said there are sufficient funds available and they want to give something back to residents.
“Looking at the overall budget, we have 50 different funds that we fund out of water and sewer funds,” Wagamon said. “A lot of things don’t generate their own revenue.
“Looking at the overall health of our budget, I feel like we can certainly afford to cut those minimum rates some. Philosophically and politically I think that the base rate is kind of a regressive tax since we use it to fund all of these other funds.”
Wagamon said he hopes to see a further reduction in the minimum rates, but a rate study is first needed.
“I think that the $2 off of each one is a good start,” Wagamon said. “I hope we don’t end up with only taking $2 off of each one.
“But since it was before we’ve had our official budget meetings, I didn’t want to get really radical with it before we can do a real rate study, which I support.”
He said the minimum rates have been “so high for so long that I felt like the council could see its way to taking something off right now and I think the 6-2 vote on the original motion reflects that.”
“I am going to propose that we fill in the rate study and we probably won’t get all of that worked out during this year’s budget season,” Wagamon said. “I really don’t know when we might we revisit the minimum rates again. It will be later in the year, I am sure, because we will have to a rate study.
“On that note, I fully intend to offer a lot more in expenditure cuts. I intend to offer specific line items in our budget to cut expenditures that hopefully will be a whole lot more than the $360,000 impact that this rate reduction will cost for the year.”
“Of course anything you do with the budget affects everything else,” Wagamon said. “But it depends on how you look at what a reserve really is. If you look at our city’s overall investments, there is about $38 million in cash-equivalent type things in our budget.
“A lot of it is on-demand accounts that are in our reserve that we can’t touch but we have a whole lot more cash than $3 million. The city manager (Bill Baine) alluded the other night at the end of our discussion his words were ‘Jack is right. We have a lot of cash. We have about $15 million sitting out there.’
“A lot of this is committed to projects but there are projects that have been on hold for years. This is not going to hurt us in the least. It is a drop in the swimming pool. It’s not much.”
Also Tuesday night, the council approved changes to Chapter 2 of the Huntsville Horizon Comprehensive Plan, eliminating everything in Chapter 2, with the exception of a description of the current zoning map and also to include a copy of the current zoning map.
“My thinking on taking the language out of the Chapter 2 Comprehensive Plan is that since the future land-use map had been rejected all of the verbage that was in there that described a map that the council didn’t want to really do was really just superfluous,” Wagamon said. “It really didn’t make any sense.
“We put in the current zoning map that we have, but we took out all the verbage that described a future land-use map that the council had rejected when they approved the Comprehensive Plan to begin with.”
When they approved it by resolution, they accepted the plan, but they rejected the future land-use map and it had 14 zones and four subzones. It was impossibly complicated.
“All of the rest of the language in Chapter 2 that described the plan really doesn’t make any sense without the map. We have the current map with just three zones and we left a paragraph that has a description of those three zones, which are the management zone, the conservation and the downtown zone.”
