What's going to start it? And I'm not doing this because y'all can't hear me. I'm doing this because we're actually recording the meeting so that if somebody else wants to review the information they're not able to attend, they can have access to it.
I'm Clay Collins. I'm the city administrator. We're conducting a couple of meetings today. This meeting was intended to be focused on commercial institutional. Unless somebody else gets here, we're going to focus on apartment complexes.
Because that's who we have here. The Sunset Valley is looking at establishing a drainage utility. I know I sent y'all some basic information about that.
Drainage is a, employee control is a major issue in the community. And so we're looking at the drainage utility as a way to help provide some funding over a stable funding mechanism to help make improvements and maintenance in our drainage system.
So we're going through this process. We want to give y'all an opportunity to ask any questions as well as look at the specifics about your property, what the possible financial impacts would be to it.
So we're going to be pretty informal. And I'll introduce George Oswald and let him take it from here.
George Oswald with SB Consultants. And we've been working with the city about a year to, I'll speak to you two because I think you're two potential customers.
So we've been working with the city about a year to evaluate the drainage utility concept in terms of how fees would be assigned to properties, what level of revenue that would develop.
And now we're on the verge of going through the formal steps of implementing the utility.
Okay, so what is a drainage utility? It's a user fee-based drainage management program like water or electricity.
Properties are assigned to fee in proportion to the demand, amount of runoff, and rate of runoff they place on the drainage system just like the amount of water you use or electricity you use.
The fees are based on impervious cover, rooftops, parking areas, driveways, not property value so this is not a tax.
The fee will be collected on the city's monthly utility bill.
And there's a set of state regulations that the city has to follow to implement and operate a drainage utility that are in the Texas local government code.
And that's the process where we followed in developing the rate structure and that we will be following over the next few weeks in the consideration of the two ordinances that implement the utility.
This isn't a new concept. There's over 60 in the state right now in municipalities throughout the state.
The state legislation was provided by the legislature I believe it was in 1987 or 89, so this has been around for many years.
And our big neighbor, the city of Austin, has had one in place since 1992.
Okay, what are the advantages of a drainage utility? It provides a stable long-term funding source for the drainage program so the city can plan into the future in terms of capital projects and operation and maintenance needs.
It's equitable. The fees are based on runoff characteristics.
And all revenue, the state, the statutes require that all revenue be used only for drainage purposes so the revenue will be managed in an enterprise fine.
It will not be used for any other purpose other than drainage management.
As far as the way fees are signed to property, I mentioned impervious cover, rooftops, driveways, parking areas for commercial properties.
And the data we use for the evaluation of the rate structure, the city has very detailed data on all developed property parcels in the city.
And that was the basis for our analysis of the rate structure.
There are 291 developed property parcels were included in the evaluation of that 291, 265 are commercial, excuse me, single family, and 26 are commercial or institutional.
And multi-family falls into that category.
All right, here's what we came up with. Let me talk about single family properties first.
We came up with a three-tiered rate structure for single family properties based on the amount of impervious area on each parcel.
If a parcel is less than 3,253 square feet of impervious area, it will be responsible for 5,500 of a billing unit.
The middle tier, which is about 70% of the single family properties, is responsible for one billing unit.
These two tiers, tier one and three, make up about 30% of the properties as responsible for 1.7 billing units.
Now, commercial and institutional, the billing unit standard based on the statistical analysis is 3,350 square feet of impervious area is equivalent to one billing unit.
And to put that into perspective, if you have one acre of impervious area, this isn't land area, but if you have one acre of hard impervious area,
that property would be responsible for 13 billing units.
Can you give me a manual assessment?
All right. Just again, to reiterate how the fees are assigned to commercial, institutional properties, taking the parcel, impervious area divided by the 3,350 square feet standard,
that defines the number of billing units, and the number of billing units, time the monthly charge, gives the monthly billing fee.
Next slide.
All right. We went through a range of different monthly billing rates.
And to share with you, we have four or five and six dollars a month per ERU.
So that would mean that middle tier of single family, and these examples paying either four or five or six,
and then those other fractional values for the high end and low end in single family.
And four dollars per billing unit assigned to commercial, we're projecting the city will develop about $100,000 a year in revenue,
$5, 125,000, $6,150,000.
For comparison, here's what other Central Texas cities are doing.
San Marcos currently charges their middle tier about four dollars a month.
They're going through a rate evaluation, and I would anticipate that to go up significantly in next fiscal year.
Georgetown 425, they're also in a rate evaluation.
College Station just went through an update rate evaluation, they're at $5 a month, and Austin's at $775.
Now, for commercial properties, just to give you an example of what those cities are charging,
and every city, depending on how impervious area is distributed, has a different billing unit standard,
but just to put it in a dollars and cents, apples to apples comparison.
And San Marcos, at their $4 a month rate, they're charging, this is one acre of land at 90% impervious cover,
so it's not 100%, but that would be typical of a fairly intense commercial development.
$70 a month, Georgetown $80 a month, College Station $93, and Austin $172.
Now to put that in perspective for Sunset Valley, let's say they start at $5 a month per billing unit.
At 90% in coverage on an acre, that'd be about 12 billing units, so the monthly charge that would compare to these would be about $60 a month.
So Sunset Valley's starting with a very modest rate.
Next slide.
All right, what will the city be doing with this?
These are the priority uses that the city has identified for this revenue source,
a voluntary acquisition of floodplain properties, drainage easement acquisitions,
structural improvements, low water crossings, and waterway maintenance program.
Schedule, we're here today for public meetings to inform the citizens and the commercial operations in the city,
what the utility is, what the potential billing rates might be.
There's two public hearings that have to take place to implement the utility.
One to declare the drainage system to be a public utility, and that is scheduled for September 7th.
Three ordinance which lays out how fees are assigned to properties and money management and enterprise fund.
That will take place on the schedule to take place on the 21st with the initial billing schedule for October.
And we have a map over here that shows each of the commercial property parcels in the city and the number of billing units that is assigned to that.
So you can walk up there and if you represent the multifamily, you can get the number of billing units that are assigned to that property.
With that, I'll take any questions you may have.
Let's walk over and take a look.