Title
Consider an ordinance amending Chapter 44, Article VI, Sections 44-149 and 44-151, Code of Ordinances (2018 Edition), regarding environmental services fees. (First Reading)(Requires Two Readings)
Body
New Fee proposal:
Recent updates to sufficient volume requirements for drinking water testing have resulted in stricter acceptance criteria for incoming client samples. Under the new criteria, samples must be rejected if they contain excessive volume that do not allow for 1-inch of headspace. When a sample is submitted with excessive volume, the lab has the option to transfer the entire sample into a larger vessel to avoid rejection.
Because rejecting samples can be inconvenient for clients and negatively impact customer satisfaction, the City’s laboratory would like to formally implement this sample transfer process. A lab sample transfer fee of $10 would cover the supplies and labor required to transfer the sample into a larger vessel and prevent unnecessary sample rejection.
In addition, the lab does not perform Heterotrophic Plate Count analysis. Therefore, we would remove this from the fee schedule.
The $50.00 cost of analyses fee is added to all Users’ water bills in the surcharge program when analyses show that a surcharge shall be applied. This fee covers the 24-hour composite sampling, sample handling, and laboratory analysis for COD and TSS testing. The $50 fee is applied monthly based on a 6-month sampling cycle (we collect $8.33/month). However, in 2021, operations shifted to annual sampling with fees to be assessed over a 12-month period. The ordinance was not revised at that time.
The City’s laboratory is proposing to revise the ordinance to accurately reflect the surcharge program’s practices since 2021. This revision would increase the analyses fee to $100, but assess the fee over a 12-month period. Since this still results in a monthly rate of $8.33, it will not cause any change to fees on any User’s water bill. The increase to $100 is appropriate and justifiable, as it accurately covers the costs associated with 24-hour composite sampling, sample handling, and laboratory analysis for COD and TSS testing.