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•CITY OF SOUTH BEND I OFFICE OF THE CLERK Committee Chair Teshka stated, First (1St) of all, I want to apologize for my tardiness. Councilmember Davis, thank you for holding it down while I was out. I would like to open the floor to questions from Committee Members. Committeemember Oliver Davis stated,A couple things. You said in a couple of years, you would come back to talk about the study. Does it normally take two (2) years to do the study? How long would it take? Mr. Horvath replied, So what we did was have this rate applied for two (2) years. We are looking to transition at that time to give people an idea of what it would be for the first (1st)two (2) years. That study can happen before and we will start it before then and then we will have a lot of dialogue with the Council because you will be involved in helping decide what those rates will be and how we will structure that. But one(1) of the issues we have is that our implementation for the billing software is an eighteen(18)month implementation cycle. We will be starting that at the beginning of the year and so we won't really be able to do anything on the billing side until eighteen (18) months regardless. So if we want to try to do that earlier, it would be near impossible for us to do it with our existing billing system. We would be spending a lot of money to have someone from the outside come in and individually redo 40,000 rates. We thought it made sense to wait for that process to be done. That is why it is two (2) years. He went on,I will say also,and I apologize because I forgot to mention this.As we've gone through this Long-Term Control Plan, I realize people continue to think we are adding fee after fee, and it really is just trying to meet the needs of the community in terms of requirements of the Clean Water Act as well as requirements of our citizens in terms of not wanting flooded streets and things like that.As part of that,we know the Long-Term Control Plan is under negotiation right now. We are working hard to get it down from a$700 million plan to somewhere around$200 million. That will help tremendously but it still puts us at a pretty high burden when you have to pay for a$200 million plan with the residents we have. We've got a significant population of low-income folks. Forty five percent (45%) of which are below ALICE. That is a significant problem. Once of the things we are researching right now and that we look forward to having dialogue on in the future is moving toward some sort of income-based rate. We want to find a way for folks with extremely low incomes will get some type of break on their rates so that they can become a little more affordable. Committeemember Davis interjected, Do you find any cities doing that now? Mr. Horvath replied, We've been talking to Philadelphia. Philadelphia is the only city I know of, in the nation,that has done it on an income-based rate. There are a number of cities we have looked at as examples that have done customer assistance programs so we are trying to do the research up front, again, to try and make sure we can, one(1), do one(1) that works within our billing system and two (2) doesn't take a lot of overhead costs. We don't want to spend five dollars ($5) to save six dollars($6), am I right? What I mean by that is if we are not careful with how we structure the program, we would have a bunch of people hired to implement a very complicated program. So we are trying to find ways to make sure things like income verification are easy to do, streamlined, and possibly done by an outside source. I know that Philadelphia's program is $2 million. So right away that is $2 million a year that isn't going to the benefit of low-income folks because you're spending it on administrative overhead. So we are trying to keep the program overhead costs down by creating a simple program. We are a number of months away from having a proposal for the EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 227W.Jefferson Bvld South Bend,Indiana 46601 p 574.235.9221 f 574.235.9173 TTD 574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 4