Utility rates up 3%
At the Tuesday, Dec. 7 meeting the Bonners Ferry City Council approved going through contractor SCJ for a rewrite of the city's comprehensive plan. From left: Adam Arthur, Valerie Thompson, Mayor Dick Staples, Rick Alonzo and Ron Smith.
Photo by EMILY BONSANT
BONNERS FERRY — Utility rates for water, septic and electric will rise 3% and golf rates will go up 3-5%.
“Under state law, there's no directive on how many times we can make changes to the fee schedule,” said City Administrator Lisa Ailport. “There is just simply a maximum amount that we can go up. [A rise of any rate] over 5% requires public input.”
Typically every September, city officials look at the utility rates at the council’s request, but that didn’t happen this year due to illness, she said.
Ailport said the city is trying to avoid falling behind inflation, which is now at 6%. The city is seeing a rise in costs across the board and hopes to keep up with the current trends, and keep the city out of the red.
She added that the city rate analysis said that rates should jump 7 to 9%, but said the council did not want that large of a jump at one time.
Councilman Rick Alonzo said that in the past when rates have jumped suddenly, commercial and industrial customers could feel the crunch.
“The 3% rate increase is anticipated to roughly create in the electric department $160,000, in the water $40,000 in the sewer$ 29,000 and in golf $4000. These increases really are just to keep us from falling too far behind inflation, which right now is closer to 6%,” Ailport said.
When it comes to the raise in golf prices, Ailport said since the prices are so low the raise in price would be an uneven amount of change back. Mayor Dick Staples said that no golfer wants to have change giggling in their pockets. He suggested that the price jump should be a round dollar amount in regard to golf rates.
The city could ask for another rate increase next year, but is looking more at the variant of their current customers.
COVID-19 presented challenges for the city’s utilities with large sectors of users off the systems when school, business and production was down.
For perspective, Ailport said that instead of paying $100 bill customers will pay $103. If this continuous unstead market doesn’t balance then Bonners Ferry may need another rate increase, said Ailport.