By Vernon Robison

Moapa Valley Progress

Several local residents attended the Moapa Valley Water Distict (MVWD) board meeting on Thursday, November 17, to lodge complaints about a recent letter they had received in the mail from the district. Earlier this month, certified letters were sent to about 90 MVWD ratepayers confirming that each had been placed on what is called an R-3 rate schedule.

The R-3 rate is designed for situations when a residential meter is servicing a parcel with commercial characteristics. Examples of this might be small apartment buildings or trailer parks that were connected to the water grid through a single residential meter.

But in the past, the R-3 rate has also been applied to single residential parcels where two structures were sharing the same meter.

The R-3 base rate is just under $45 per month, while the base rate for a standard residential parcel is about $30 per month.

Most of the ratepayers in attendance at Thursday’s meeting had misunderstood the letter to mean that their base rate was increasing due to the second home on their lot.

But MVWD staff emphasized that this was not the case. Acting General Manager Joe Davis explained that the letter was no a notice of increasing in rates. Rather the notification had been sent out as part of a process to review the R-3 residential policy.

“There was no intention of raising rates here,” Davis told the group. “We were just letting you know that this is a rate code that you were already on and we wanted to hear from the people who were out there if they didn’t fit in that rate category.”

But many in attendance questioned the fairness of having their residence on an R-3 rate in the first place.

“Frankly, I don’t think this is a fair rate,” said Overton resident Chris Trombley. “I have two houses on my property, one person lives in each house. I pay for the water that my mom uses in the other house. We are paying for the exact water usage we are incurring. You aren’t getting any less water or more use even if we had a second meter. I think it is just not fair to double bill us for a meter, just because there are two houses on the property. This seems like just a way to get more money from us.”

The board members tended to agree with Trombley’s logic.

“I think that this letter was just to sort of get us set to deal with this issue because I really don’t have an argument for that,” said MVWD Board member Lindsey Dalley. “I appreciate that you came because this kind of thing gets under my skin too.”

“We have every intention of making sure that you are not getting double billed on this,” emphasized MVWD board member Scott Carson. “This is a policy from years past. Speaking for myself I want to get it taken care of as quickly as possible.”

“My concern is that we are oustretching the reach of what we are; which is a purveyor of water,” said board member Randy Tobler. “We are basically trying to police this. We have put a lot of staff time into it and in the end we are, not only going to be unpopular, but we are also going to make the wrong call most of the time. The county has a code in place for this and they don’t even enforce it. I don’t know how we would do it.”

Board chairman Ken Staton, asked Davis how long the policy had been in place. But Davis said that, though he had researched it extensively, he couldn’t find where the practice was ever made a firm policy.

“The reason it happened was that in years past we were very limited on our resources,” Davis said.

He explained that the staff had been instructed to notate accounts where they observed travel trailers or toy haulers attached to water connections on residential lots. After a couple of months of this, the ratepayers were notified that they would be put on the R-3 rate if the travel trailer hose remained connected, Davis said.

“That is how a lot these people got put on this rate,” Davis said. “Starting back in the Van (Robinson) administration and continuing all the way to now. Now I have inherited it and it has become a major issue.”

“Well it just doesn’t look good,” said Carson. “We have tried really hard all year long to be this friendly neighborhood water district and now that perception is going to get shot out of the water if we don’t resolve this and make the right call.”

Davis said that, since the practice hadn’t been found in the official manual of district policies that it could probably be discontinued without any board action. He said that staff would go through the minutes of past meetings and make sure that there had been no official policy enacted in the past. If anything is found, the policy would be brought before the board at a future meeting, he said. If not the residential customers on an R-3 rate would be notified and returned back to the regular residential rate schedule, Davis said.

In other business at the meeting, the board determined to change the district policy on late fees for delinquent accounts.

The original policy was to charge 10% on delinquent account balances. This charge would compound each month over the entire balance causing the bill to exponentially increase over time.

Last year, the prior board had revised this policy so that the late fee would be 10% charged only on the outstanding balance and not compound on the interest.

“The problem is that the interest is still growing astronomically,” said Davis. “And I don’t think that the intent of the board then was to clean all that up.”

Davis explained that the current staff recommendation was for the board to change the policy so that the 10% late fee would be charged only on the current month’s charges.

“This allows the user charges to stay down,” Davis said. “We don’t have that monstrously inflated interest amount where a customer comes back and is looking at $4,000 just in interest and only $400 in real usage fees.”

The board adopted the staff recommendation and passed the motion unanimously.

In connection with this action, another agenda item dealt with the old district policy of removing water meters from properties that had gone delinquent for two years or more. As the late fees had increased and compounded in delinquent accounts over a 24 month period, the policy had been to remove the meter from the parcel until the balance was paid on the account.

But when the meter was removed, the district’s policy considered that it was now as if no meter had ever been on the property. For a subsequent parcel owner to restore water service, he/she would have to pay the full hookup fee including a water resource fee which, by itself, was over $5,000.

Over the past year, the new board had changed that policy to instruct staff to cease from removing meters from delinquent properties.

In October, the board granted a request from a new property owner to waive the full water impact fee to reinstall a meter to a property where the meter had been removed. At that time, the board had decided that the customer should only be charged the cost to reinstall a new meter plus the previously outstanding delinquent usage charges.

Knowing at the time, that there would be other properties in similar circumstances, the board asked that staff bring back a presentation of just how many meters had been removed under the previous policy and a total of the costs associated with extending the same waiver to each of them.

Davis reported that there had been 16 meters removed under the policy. Six of them had already been re-installed by new owners who had paid for a new meter installation.

The staff recommendation was to waive the impact fee for the remaining ten properties with a similar arrangement as had been granted in last month’s case.

“In each of these cases, the water impact fee for the property has technically already been paid,” Davis said. “So this action would have no real financial impact on the district.”

The board agreed to follow the staff recommendation. The vote was unanimous.