Moroni City Council restructures sewer rates in the name of fairness

MORONI—The Moroni City Council has passed an ordinance designed to make its sewer charges more fair for people who are forced to use culinary water or irrigation.

Presently, sewer charges are based on culinary water consumption. But people who water their lawns with culinary water obviously consume more water than people who are hooked up to pressurized irrigation.

The ordinance, which was passed March 20, says the city will determine a customer’s average monthly consumption for winter months (November through March). It will use that average in calculating the customer’s sewer charge during summer months (April through October).

“We roll their rate in the summer to what it was in the winter time,” Mayor Paul Bailey said. The customer needs to come to the city office to register for the program. At that time, the city will that verify the customer doesn’t have pressurized irrigation.

In June, 2024, the city put a moratorium on nearly all new connections to pressurized irrigation. The problem was not lack of water but rather an old and overtaxed irrigation delivery system.

Piping for the system was installed 40-45 years ago, the mayor said at the time. The system was never designed to serve the number of connections now on the system. Some of the pipe is brittle. Frequently, when the city shuts off a section of the system to fix leaks, then turns water on, the pipes break again.

Councilman Thayne Atkinson said there might be two or three older homes in the city that never connected to irrigation water.

But the new pricing calculation applies mainly to homes outside the city that receive their culinary water from the city but aren’t yet connected to pressurized irrigation, and to new homes that have been completed and/or have put in yards in the past nine months.

Mayor Bailey and City Recorder Carol Haskins emphasized that the ordinance basing sewer charges on winter water consumption is intended to be temporary.

The city has its consulting engineering firm looking for grants for the $5 to $10 million estimated cost of digging up and replacing the whole irrigation system. Optimally, getting the new system in could take a couple of years.

With the potential impact the irrigation moratorium has on sewer revenue, “this irrigation system needs to be a priority,” Councilman Bevan Wulfenstein said.

Meanwhile, the city has asked Sunrise Engineering to conduct a sewer rate study to find out what it needs to be charging, now and down the road, to finance the sewer system.

“If we get a new irrigation system, we want people to hook onto it,” Mayor Bailey said. “If they don’t want to, they will be charged the (regular) sewer rate. Is that what we’re thinking?”

“You have to have an incentive for people who hook onto irrigation,” Councilman Atkinson said. “You could have people who don’t want to hook up because of the initial cost, which could be $5,000.

“You can definitely say, ‘Now you’ve had the opportunity, the moratorium’s lifted off irrigation. If you don’t want to, you’ll have to pay the sewer (based on monthly culinary water consumption year-round).