VENTNOR – The city commissioners introduced measures Thursday that would set the city’s annual water and sewer rates with the expectation that residents would be charged for usage starting in June.
The ordinances, which separately set the rates for the city’s dedicated water and sewer utility, establish a flat fee plus fees for usage.
As introduced Feb. 16, residents would pay a flat fee of $335 annually for combined water and sewer service from the Ventnor Water and Sewer Utility – $159 for water and $176 for sewage – plus their usage fees as determined through meter readings.
However, the fixed rate would be billed in quarterly installments of $83.75.
Under the ordinances users would additionally be billed each quarter for actual usage at the rate of $1.12 per 1,000 gallons of water from October through June ($1.60 per 1,000 gallons in July, August and September), and $3.80 per 1,000 gallons for sewer usage in the off season ($5.43 per 1,000 gallons during July, August and September).
Mayor Theresa Kelly said the quarterly billing is a change from the biannual bills users received in the past. The first bills are expected to be sent out after the Thursday, March 15 commission meeting, when both ordinances are expected to be voted upon for second reading and final public hearing.
“The first quarter, to ensure everyone is on the system, we’re only going to be charging the flat fee,” Kelly said Monday, Feb. 20.
“The first bill will not have usage on it. It will have only the flat rate. The second will have the flat rate, plus usage,” she said.
Bills will be due in July, October and December and sent out a month prior to the due date.
Kelly said that by that time the city begins charging for usage on the June bill, they should have at least two readings on people’s homes, and any questions about usage can be checked against the readings.
“Right now there are some people who, for various reasons, we’re getting false readings, so we are going back and doing those manually,” said Kelly. “We’re reading now. As you and I are speaking the meters are being read.”
She added that she hopes residents will conserve their water usage once they see how much they are using.
Kelly said a tower to read the meters remotely will be installed on the roof of City Hall in the coming months. She said the meters are being read electronically by a public works vehicle that drives down streets, and any irregularities prompt a manual reading by a public works employee.
“Once we get the tower up – that’s going to happen soon – we can tell them if there’s a leak, if their toilet is running, or whatever would increase their usage. Those kinds of things people need to take care of, we will now know of the problem,” the mayor said.
She said the task of switching over to a per-usage rate was done with the help of many people, including business administrator Sandra Biagi, chief financial officer Toro Aboderin, Margaret Pacanowski in the finance office, tax collector Julie Harron and water department supervisor Tom Klein.
When the current administration was elected in May 2008, the commissioners soon recognized that 8,700 homes in the city did not have functioning water meters. They estimated that residents had not been charged for usage since 2002. Residents were only charged for the base usage of 65,000 gallons of water annually.
In January 2010, Vanguard Company of
The $693 residents paid annually in 2011 was an increase of $53 over the previous year. Residents were charged $515 annually in the years from 2006-2009.
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