Often water and wastewater infrastructure are the most expensive assets a community possesses and the burden of meeting state water quality regulations is borne disproportionately more by smaller inland communities. With today’s ever increasing cost to meet water quality regulations, locating grants, low interest financing, setting affordable rates and fairly apportioning cost are more critical than ever.

Representative Municipal Finance Projects

City of Yuba City

ECO:LOGIC reviewed the City’s existing rate structure for water and sewer and recommended revisions to the rate structures that would streamline the billing process and at the same time improve rate equity. A revenue model was created for both enterprise funds that looked at projected operations, maintenance and capital needs through 2009-10. Based on the projected funding needs, costs were allocated and rates calculated based on the relative demand on the utility system by each user group.

City of Colusa

ECO:LOGIC Engineering is working with the City of Colusa to design improvements to its wastewater facilities that will allow the City to comply with state discharge requirements by 2005. As part of this effort, ECO:LOGIC is also working with the City to update its current monthly sewer user charges and development impact fees. The current rate structure was established in the 1970s and is based on water meter size. The City wishes to update the billing rate structure such that rates charged are based more directly on the actual impact to the sewer facilities by customer category. The City is also anticipating significant new development over the next five to ten years. The City sewer impact fees will be updated by ECO:LOGIC to reflect the anticipated costs to expand the sewer facilities to serve new growth.

City of Turlock

ECO:LOGIC, in association with EPS, prepared a funding analysis that considered both monthly user rates and connection fees. Working with the City of Turlock, a revenue model was constructed based on historical and projected operating, maintenance and capital costs and which calculated rates and fees that would fully fund the water enterprise system going forward. In addition, as requested by the City, alternative rate and fee structures were considered based on an equivalent dwelling unit methodology to simplify revenue collection processes.