Council passes sewer plan; fees, financing decisions to follow
The City Council this month endorsed a master plan for expanding Columbia’s sewer system, projecting that the number of sewer customers will grow from 108,000 to 175,000 in the next 23 years and that the size of the coverage area will triple by 2030.
The plan recommends a combination of fee and service rate increases, and the proposed projects include the installation of nearly 400,000 feet of relief sewers—more than a third of it in the next three years—and the installation of more than 260,000 feet of new sewer lines by 2030.
Where sewers are built, development soon follows. So the master plan is under careful study by the real estate, development and construction industries. Significant increases in connection fees would mean higher costs for builders, which would in turn get passed on to homeowners and businesses.
Based on recommendations from Kansas City consultants Black & Veatch, the plan calls for $251 million in improvements by the year 2030. However, Steve Hunt, a sewer engineer with the city Public Works Department, says the plan actually presented only $160 million in projects to the council for now.
“Adopting the master plan acknowledges the general concepts of the plan and the ideas behind it; it doesn’t commit the council to any construction projects or anything like that,” Hunt said. “The next step would be to put together a bond package for the council to consider that we could then take to the voters. One of our first priorities would be to upgrade the wastewater treatment facility. At this point, we have not sat down as a staff and looked at how much of a bond issue we would be looking at.”
Hunt is careful not to say where new sewers will be built; prior knowledge of sewer construction can raise land values. However, he said major sewer trunk lines generally follow the course of local creeks and extend outward to areas further upstream.
“It’s kind of one of those chicken-and-egg things,” Hunt said. “The city typically does not build new sewers until there is a request for them, and the request is typically followed by the property annexing.”
The plan proposes to increase connection fees by 25 percent in 2007, 2009 and 2011 and by 50 percent in 2013. The connection fee is $500 per connection today by every new entity that hooks to the sewer system.
“We obviously support the sewer master plan from the perspective of the infrastructure needing to be there; the question is always who pays,” said Annie Pope, executive officer of the Home Builders Association of Greater Columbia. “The sewer connection fees look like they are going to increase pretty substantially, and that, of course, is going to increase the cost of housing.”
Pope said it appeared that much of the sewer plan money was to be used for improving existing sewers, but much of the burden would be charged to builders of new construction and, therefore, new homeowners. “It’s already $500 a tap now, and it’s going to go up into the thousands,” she said. “If you look at the aggregate burden of all of Columbia’s development fees, it’s $23,000 per house. If you add another $1,000, it’s $24,000 a house.
That’s just a huge burden that, in this town, we are passing on to the new home buyer when it should be allocated to ratepayers across the board.”
Pope said her $23,000 figure is a rough, ballpark estimate of average per-lot fees during the last five years that includes $4,000 in building permits; $8,000 for roads, sewers and other infrastructure internal to a development; $8,000 for stormwater compliance; and $3,000 for off-site improvements necessary to bring roads, water lines, sewer lines and other infrastructure into a development.
While there are many variables that affect how fees are calculated, Jim Paneck, chief building inspector for the City of Columbia, said a $4,000 estimate is too high for the city’s fees. Pulling three random samples of residences in Columbia from the files, a 4,900-square-foot house totaled about $2,900 in fees; a 2,700-square-foot house totaled about $1,450; and a 2,250-square-foot house totaled about $1,350 for all permit, sewer connection, stormwater and development fees.
The Boone County Smart Growth Coalition believes developers should pay 25 to 50 percent of the actual cost of providing sewers to a new development, said Ben Londeree, the group’s co-chair. When the total sewer system, with its treatment plant and sewers, was built, it was built with reserve capacity to allow for growth, he said, meaning that there are costs that come from buying into the existing system and costs that come from extending the sewer to where the developer needs it.
“Five years ago, we calculated how much that was, and it was about $1,500 or $1,600, so it is probably approaching $2,000 per residential lot with inflation,” Londeree said. “Our position is that 25 to 50 percent of that cost ought to be covered up front with the development fee.”
The current master plan revises a 1973 plan, also completed by Black & Veatch, who submitted the first draft of the revised plan in 2004. The plan was first presented to the council in March 2006.