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ong>Council hopes to adopt new fees in January

OGDEN -- Comparing Ogden's infrastructure to an old car with a lot of miles on it, Ogden city officials said Tuesday night the city's water, sewer and storm sewer rates need to be raised by the end of the year to keep the wheels from falling off.

How much will rate payers get hit? Craig Frisbee, utility manager, doesn't know.

"It's going to be pretty good-size," he said after a public forum for city residents at Union Station. "It won't be a big kick. It will be pretty substantial, but it's not going to be anything that's going to hurt them."

If he sounds mixed it's because there are a lot of variables involved, and the city has just begun studying the problem.

Frisbee said many of the city's aging sewer and water pipes, some 100 years old, need to be replaced. Storm sewers can't handle runoff, homeowners on the city's East Bench complain of low water pressure, and he showed pictures of waterlines that have been patched numerous times because of age, even as new homes and businesses demand more from the city's system.

The problem, he told the estimated 30 residents who attended the forum, is the city's utility rates have only been raised 30 percent in the last 20 years. In that time, inflation has gone up 67 percent, eating fund surpluses and leaving the utilities unable to do anything but day-to-day repairs.

This increase will be on top of an annual increase that just went into effect.

Frisbee said nobody is suggesting that all the city's old pipes be replaced at once. What he needs, he said, is enough money in the system so that when crews find a pipe that needs to be replaced, they can do so, instead of just patching it.

The city council had the town meeting at Union Station as part of its "Water Horizons" program, an attempt to look at the city's entire water and sewer infrastructure and set up rate and repair schedules to keep it running smoothly in the future.

The council has hired a consulting firm. Laura Lewis, owner of Lewis, Young, Robertson & Burningham, said her firm will take current city billing into account, look at what the city's infrastructure needs are, and try to come up with a new rate structure that both allows rebuilding and regular maintenance while, at the same time, not hitting homeowners more than it has to.

A second public forum, when proposed rates are ready, will be at the end of October or in early November.

City council members at the meeting said they hope to be able to adopt new rates by January.

Lewis said forums like Tuesday's are an effort to hear what concerns residents have. She got a huge list.

Residents asked about impact fees, concessions for people on fixed incomes, the possibility of expanding secondary water so homes don't need to use culinary water, and demands that existing pipes be fixed before the new funds are used to build new lines.

Julie Park, who lives in a part of Ogden where the sewer lines are 50 years old, and whose husband owns a business in the same area, asked about inter-fund loans that the city's utilities have made to other city departments, and what the city would do to keep businesses from being hurt during repairs.

She wasn't opposed to the work, she said, just concerned that it be done right.

"We need to do this," she said. "Two years ago the sewers in our neighborhood backed up, and now every time it rains I just panic."

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