Agenda - 05-16-2000-9a - Laserfiche WebLink

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ORANGE COUNTY BOARD OF COMMISSIONERS ACTION AGENDA ITEM ABSTRACT Meeting Date: May 16, 2000 Action Agenda Item No. ~~ SUBJECT: Efland Sewer Fund -Demand Related Revisions to Fee Schedule DEPARTMENT: County Engineer PUBLIC HEARING: (Y/N) No ATTACHMENT(S): INFORMATION CONTACT: 3/20/2000 County Engineer Memo Paul Thames, ext 2303 TELEPHONE NUMBERS: Hillsborough 732-8181 Chapel Hill 968-0501 Durham 688-7331 Mebane 336-227-2031 PURPOSE: To receive a report on the relationship between home size, water consumption and sewer demand in the Efland area and to consider revising the fee schedule for sewer connections to reflect this relationship and its implications for service demands. BACKGROUND: At its October 19, 1999 meeting the BOCC amended the "Rules and Regulations for Operation of the System" for the Efland sewer system as necessary to adopt the following revised fee structure: 1) a stub-out service line fee which recovers the administrative and construction cost of installing the service line on the basis of a "cost plus" fee structure; 2) an acreage fee of $1,000 per acre, some or all of which may be designated for retiring the debt (including interest) for the General Fund loan that helped finance the cost of constructing the existing system; some or all of which may be designated to dund capital replacement of existing infrastructure: 3) a County availability fee of $600 per sewer tap; 4) a straight "pass-through" of Hillsborough availability fees, an amount as determined on a case-by-case basis by the Town. However, the Board also expressed an interest in evaluating and perhaps ultimately adopting a "sliding scale" fee structure, somewhat similar (in terms of the fee amount reflecting a customer's or category of customer's service demand impact on the system) to that created by the Orange Water and Sewer Authority (OWASA). The OWASA study showed that the size - square footage - of a house served directly correlated with the water and sewer demand of that house. The results of the Efland study showed a similar, nearly straight line, correlation between house size and water demand. However, the variation in water demand between the smallest and largest houses in Efland did not show the dramatic variation identified in the OWASA study. The Efland study detected an approximate 30 percent differential between the smallest and largest categories (delineated by ranges of house square footages) of water users where the OWASA study detected nearly a 500 percent differential.