Greenfield sewer rates approved, budget public hearing planned

GREENFIELD — Sewer rates will be going up soon for Greenfield residents after a resolution was passed on the matter at the city council’s March 1 meeting at city hall.

The rates will go up by an average of $12 per customer, according to information provided prior to the meeting by City Clerk Becky Haase.

Prior to the meeting, city officials said that the rate increase is necessary because of the cost of hiring an additional certified person to run the new wastewater treatment plant, in order to plan for the eventual retirement of the plant’s current operator Brad Mueller.

There are also other increased costs that are coming along with the new plant, which went live in 2019 after increased intake meant Greenfield needed a new plant to meet standards set by the Department of Natural Resources. The Grade 3 plant, Mueller said in an interview for the Free Press recently, is efficient and state of the art.

A resident came to the council on behalf of other residents saying that according to their calculations, the sewer rate increased, as proposed, seems high. He said that if one includes the proposed rate increase, it would represent a 462% hike dating back to January 2017.

Haase said during the meeting that wages and benefits for one employee equals approximately $90,000 annually. Those other “increased costs,” Haase said, mainly include higher utility costs at the wastewater treatment plant than what engineer’s originally projected.

“Those were projected to go down over time and they’re not. If anything, they’re going up,” Haase said. “In order to have the wastewater treatment plant be solvent, this is a necessary increase.”

Council member Brian Fox said that when compared to Des Moines, which has a lot more tax dollars at its disposal, Greenfield’s rates are low. The concerned resident also noted that electric and water rates have barely increased here since 2014.

“We have to remember we have a sewer collection system that we have had to rebuild that should’ve been taken care of long before we got here, so it has kind of snowballed,” said Fox. “We’ve got another phase of our collection system that we’re going to have to do in about two years. We didn’t plan on having to build this facility until our water volume spiked and the DNR came in and said you have to build this system. We’ve talked and talked about this, but actually, this is our only option.”

The new rates were passed and the second and third readings of the resolution were waived.

Budget hearing

The council set a public hearing date of March 16 at 6:30 p.m. for the public review and potential passage of the proposed FY 2022 city budget.

In describing the budget process recently, Haase said the council’s finance committee and Mayor Jimmie Schultz met together to start, and they conferred with department heads for their needs, then Haase went to work in crunching numbers.

Haase said that a city is primarily funded through property tax revenue and road use tax money from the State of Iowa, which are based on fuel sales and registrations. The city also takes in revenue from the sewer plant which can only be put back toward the sewer plant.

Other ways to gain revenue are through levying debt service through bonding, which is only initiated by a legal process, and can be used to pay for streets, sewers or big equipment purchases. Haase said that for the most part, councils in her time with the city have been “fairly conservative” in their approach of spending money like this.