The Nugget Newspaper - News and Opinion from Sisters, Oregon

Delaying a hefty sewer connection fee payment might turn out to be an advantage for the Sisters School District.

After meeting with the school district to ask it to pay up on an overdue invoice, city officials discovered the city might need to reimburse the district some money.

Neil Thompson, city planner, said the city might reimburse the district for the money it spent to connect the new high school to the sewer last summer.

At the very least, the city will charge the district 40 percent less than the $210,000 Systems Development Charge (SDC) next summer.

Even more, Thompson said he expects the district will pay a little less for the fees it still owes for connecting the new middle school.

Thompson and other city officials met with school district officials last week to discuss the $86,000 SDC bill, which the district incurred when it connected the new middle school to the sewer system last summer.

Sewer fees are based on a calculation of water usage.

The city also charged the school district another $29,000 for 29 Equivalent Dwelling Units (EDU) for connecting the middle school to the sewer.

One EDU equals the use of 125 gallons of water per day and the city charged the schools $1,000 per EDU of connection fees, and $2,994 per EDU for the SDC, said Eileen Stein, city manager.

Thompson said he has discovered the new fixtures and facilities at the new high school consume significantly less water.

Thompson said the middle school, which was designed more than 10 years ago, is designed for 500 students and consumes about 6.9 gallons of water per student per day.

He said the new high school, on the other hand, is designed to fit 700 students, and only consumes 3.91 gallons of water per student per day.

Thompson said he was able to gather this data by looking at the high school's water consumption for the past year, since it has been connected to the sewer. Since the district was charged sewer and water fees when the construction permit was issued, the city could only guess how much water the new school would consume based on the history of the older schools.

"Just by using more modern fixtures, (the new high school) is a much better design," Thompson said. "That has been a real eye opener to me."

The difference in water consumption will result in water and sewer fees which cost at least 40 percent less than the approximate $210,000 the district paid when it connected the high school.

The city might reimburse that money or allocate credit to the invoice the district still owes for the new middle school.

Thompson said last summer's high school charges were based on allocating .1 EDU per student of design (700 students), for the $1,000 per EDU connection fee and the $2,994 per EDU SDC.

Thompson said the new middle school, which was charged for 29 EDU, had more accurate sewer and water fees because the charges were based on its history of city water consumption.

But he said he has also reevaluated that data, based on consumption for the last three months on the sewer system.

He said he is finding the new middle school to use 27.73 EDU rather than 29 EDU.

"If the school is new, we charge them when the permit is issued, prior to the construction," Thompson said. "If there is no history, we must guess.

"When the old high school was converted to the middle school, we didn't know the impact because it had never been used as a middle school before, and it had a new number of students," he said.

Thompson said calculating the SDCs was a complicated process, in which he tried to guess how much impact the new schools would have on the sewer.