08-15-18 Personnel and Finance (#3)

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CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK Mr. Horvath replied, That is why we decided to add four (4) people. They are able to actually be on the ground and do the work. The Council has done a very good job in supporting our needs in the past and I think that is one (1) area we have done well in. We have done a very good job in keeping up with our capital equipment over the years. Committee Chair White asked, How much is in Major Moves? Also, we've not made mention of the Rainy Day Fund. Have you used those dollars? It would nice to have a sense of the whole budget and the fund sources. Mr. Horvath replied, We can get that information to you. Mr. Horvath continued, We are now going to go over stormwater. I will try to be quick on this but this will take subsequent meetings of the Council and will take us an enabling ordinance as well. Committeemember Voorde left the meeting at 6:13 p.m. Mr. Horvath went on, In a nutshell on stormwater, again, this is one (1) of those buried assets that is often forgot about until you have some major event and then our phones don't stop ringing for the next week. These are real issues for people. The issue we have is that there is no dedicated funding source for stormwater in South Bend. We are asking the Council to consider a new stormwater utility and the fee associated with that to support some ongoing stormwater needs. We will talk a little bit about that to give you an idea of what our proposal is and what we've got in there in terms of cost. I will glance over these (referencing a slide in the presentation). Again, any funding that we provide in the past has primarily been wastewater and road funding. Most stormwater programs across the nation look at the amount of impervious surface on a lot. Impervious surfaces are rooftops or a driveway hard surface where you get a lot of run off. Based on that square footage, they give you a fee that is associated with.that. A lot of the times what they'll do is they will sign an equivalent unit on a resident. So they'll look at how much impervious surface a residential unit has and then utilize that as a basis to look at commercial and industrial sites. He continued, So what we did was something related to that but modified to make it a little simplier to enact in the first (1 st) year. That was doing a flat rate of two dollars ($2) per resident per month and that will be put on their utility bill. Then based on the non-residential customers' impervious surface area, the bottom third, roughly, would be four dollars ($4) per month, the middle third would be eight dollars ($8), and then the top third on the larger properties would be twenty dollars ($20) per month. It is a modified approach to make it more simple to enact in the first (1St) place and still helps us generate some revenue to start building some capital infrastructure. The stormwater fee will be for all properties except unimproved lots and public right-of-way. If you have a vacant lot with nothing on it, there will not be a charge to it. You can see (referencing a slide in the presentation) some of the national trends, there are over 1,600 stormwater utilities in the United States. The national average for residential is sixty dollars ($60) annually. That is about five dollars ($5) a month, annually. He went on, We have outlined some of the needs we have that are most immediate. About $2.9 million between capital and professional services are highlighted. We are implementing this fee to meet capital needs more than anything. We have no intention of putting any operations or maintenance costs in here. Those are currently being born primarily by the wastewater utility. We EXCELLENCE I ACCOUNTABILITY I INNOVATION I INCLUSION I EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 1 227 W.Jefferson Bvld I South Bend,Indiana 466011 p 574.235.9221 If 574.235.9173',TTD574.235.55671www.southbendin.gov 12