Title
Consider an ordinance amending Chapter 44, Sections 44-149 and 44-151, Code of Ordinances (2018 Edition), regarding environmental services fees. (First Reading)*
Body
The City of Round Rock Environmental Services Division implements the City’s surcharge program to reduce excess amounts of solids and oxygen demanding substances from entering the wastewater system. The City requires all industries and businesses that discharge high-strength wastewater to pay an additional fee to recover the additional costs for treating those wastes. To test for high strength wastewater, the City’s laboratory performs Biochemical Oxygen Demand (BOD) and Total Suspended Solids (TSS) testing. Semi-annually, the surcharge program conducts wastewater sampling and testing on businesses wastewater discharge.
The City currently analyzes the wastewater at the City’s in-house laboratory for BOD and TSS. The laboratory would like to start testing for Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) instead of BOD to save on man hours and increase testing capability. In addition, the COD test takes a few hours to run compared to BOD which takes five days to complete. By switching to COD, we will cut the analysis time in half, therefore doubling our testing capacity. The cost savings will be twelve dollars per sample by performing COD over BOD.
When running COD and BOD on a wastewater sample, the COD is 2.1 times higher than BOD. Therefore, the surcharge rate for COD needs to be 2.1 times lower than BOD to keep the surcharge cost in the same range for businesses.
The ordinance currently only applies surcharges to businesses that we can sample. However, due to site characteristics, sampling at certain sites is not possible.
The current fee for cost of analysis needs to be increased to account for increased testing costs, as well as the sampling fee for wastewater discharge. The cost of the analysis fee hasn’t been increased since the inception of the surcharge program.
A few items in the City of Round Rock Ordinance Article VI-Environmental Services Fees need to be modified as follows:
• For users whose non domestic sewage that has not been sampled or cannot be sampled due to site characteristics, a sewer surcharge will be applied based on quality data for similar Industry per Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) codes.
• For businesses to not see an increase in surcharge amount, the COD surcharge needs to decrease from $0.477 per pound to $0.227 per pound.
• The period of surcharge needs to be changed from six months to 12 months to allow enough time for sampling and testing of every business. If analyses for TSS and/or BOD/COD shows that a surcharge is applicable, the surcharge shall be applied to the monthly water bill for a period of one year.
• The cost of analyses should be increased from $50.00 to $100.00 to cover testing cost and labor.
• If a user requests a re-sampling event, the user shall pay all related re-sampling fees. The results from the re-sampling event shall be averaged with the results from the original sampling event to obtain a final surcharge value.
• A chemical oxygen demand (COD) fee of $20.00 per sample will be added to the ordinance.
• The surcharge re-sampling fee for wastewater discharge should be increased from $75.00 to $100.00 per sample to cover sampling labor costs.