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Wednesday, October 16, 2002

By Jim Hosek, Tri-State Sports & News Service

West Mifflin Sanitary Sewer Municipal Authority is doing everything required, logical and possible to keep costs down, General Manager Jim Hannan said.

He responded to complaints made by residents, including 358 who signed a petition, and borough Councilman Richard Olasz after imposition of a new rate structure under which most residential and commercial sewage bills are rising.

On top of that, 850 residents, mainly in the Streets Run, Sky View and Homeville neighborhoods, who used to pay lower rates to Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, now are billed at West Mifflin's rates. "Our bills were averaging $15 or $16 under Alcosan. Last month, it was $33 under West Mifflin. This is outrageous," Bill Hawk of Muldowny Avenue said.

"People's bills have doubled and tripled," his wife, Eleanor, said. "There are people who are afraid to use water to wash their clothes, clean their cars and water their grass. People just can't afford this."

They can't understand why the switch was made from Alcosan.

"We were always responsible for those sewers, even though they were being billed at Alcosan rates," Hannan said. "Everyone else in the borough was subsidizing them, even though they might not have known that. It's just a matter of fairness. If they didn't pay their bills, we had to pay it to Alcosan for them."

The most common recent complaint by sewer customers is that they're being charged for water they didn't use. That's because a customer using 2,100 gallons of water, for example, would be billed as if using 3,000 gallons. Gallons are rounded up to the next 1,000 gallons.

"This rate structure was well thought out. This is the rate resolution that was passed by the authority to make ends meet," Hannan said. "Some people might not like it. But if we would change that structure, then we'd have less revenue coming in and we'd have to raise rates."

He said past billing was supposed to be rounded up to the next 1,000 gallons the same way. However, it was discovered only recently that Legal Tax Service, which does the billing, did not do that.

Olasz has a beef with Legal Tax Service, which is partially owned by borough Solicitor Don Fetzko. He said one reason for the high sewage rates is that the company's rates are so high.

Olasz also said the company has "an unheard-of five-year contract" with the authority and received $700,000 in fees the past four years -- and that with the recent rate increase, the amount will increase.

Hannan said the company gets 3.58 percent of what it collects, so it will make more money with the new rate structure.

Olasz also believes residents will be upset in the future because the $33.78 million in bonds that the authority owes are ballooned, meaning higher payments and rate increases are coming. He also cited clauses in the bonds that they can't be refinanced at lower interest rates.

Although Hannan agreed the bonds can't be refinanced and that they were ballooned, he said payments have leveled off, so there should not be future increases based on that. "If the bonds weren't done the way they were a few years ago, people would have been shocked by the drastic rate hikes immediately," he said. "The authority, at the time, didn't want such a drastic increase in rates immediately."

Hannan maintained the debt was made necessary by a 1993 consent order with the federal Environmental Protection Agency and the state Department of Environmental Protection. Had the authority not agreed to do everything in the consent order, it would have been fined, he said, adding that the borough was fined a lot of money in 1993 for sewer violations.

"There's only one issue left with the consent order, and this will be a big burden, if we have to do it," Hannan said. That would be building a one-million-gallon holding tank for at least $2 million. He said the authority is trying to get out of doing it.

As far as future rates go, He said: "I don't have a crystal ball. Chances are there won't be rate increases in the next couple years. But we have an aging system. And if the government says we have to do something in the future, we'll have to do it."