Geneva aldermen OK recommendation to update city’s utility code

GENEVA – Aldermen on Monday recommended approval of some changes to the city’s utility ordinance, revising language and code sections to update procedures.

The changes include removing the requirement for deposits, changing the billing cycle form, revising the fee schedule for disconnections and reducing the penalty waiver to one per year.

Finance Director Rita Kruse and Superintendent of Water and Wastewater Bob Van Gyseghem had presented the proposed changes at a special Committee of the Whole March 13.

Regarding the reduction in billing cycles to two from four, Kruse said in the 1990s, three meter readers would manually read residents’ meters each month, Kruse said.

“Walk into a house, read the meter, type it into a handheld, go back to Public Works and then download the data,” Kruse said.

Currently, nearly all meters in the city are read digitally with an encoder receiver transmitter – known as an ERT – which reads meters hourly and daily, she said.

So the four cycle billing – on the 6th, 15th, 22nd and 30th of the month – can be reduced to two, on the 15th and the 30th of the month, Kruse said.

The dates were based on the customers’ physical locations. Reducing the billing cycles will free up the utility biller for other duties, she said.

“It’s a good way to make processes a little simpler,” Kruse said.

Customers have an opt-out, Van Gyseghem said, which requires an additional fee for a manual reading.

City Administrator Stephanie Dawkins said the code revisions will add the manual reading fee to the electric service, as it is currently only applied to the water service.

The changes would also increase the city’s reimbursement of the sanitary sewer lateral lining and grouting program being increased to $10,000 from $5,000.

Van Gyseghem said the justification comes from current costs being between $6,000 and $12,000.

The program stems from the city seeking to seal off old sewer pipes that leak and allow storm water to enter during heavy rain events, which causes sewers to back up, officials said.

Van Gyseghem said the city had four participants in the reimbursement program the first year, last year there were six and there are six so far this year, with three waiting to be approved.

Another change will affect 68 accounts on the city’s north side that St. Charles provides sewer service, based on an intergovernmental agreement from the 1990s, Kruse said.

“These accounts, from the beginning, have always been charged city of Geneva rates,” Kruse said. “We, then, get billed from St. Charles, St. Charles rates, based upon their Geneva usage.”

Because the rates are so disparate – as St. Charles’ rates have gone up more than Geneva’s – Kruse said she was asking for a change in the city code to allow Geneva to bill these residents according to St. Charles’s utility code, instead of Geneva’s utility code.

“An average 3/4 inch meter 600 cubic feet for residential property – Geneva paid $24.01 and St. Charles is going to be $48.48. There is a large discrepancy now,” Kruse said. “The reason why I’m asking this change is to put a section in the code that would allow us to bill these residents the St. Charles code instead of the city of Geneva code, so we can recoup the entire cost.”

Gyseghem explained these residents get St. Charles sewer service because of the elevation and topography of the area.

It was more cost effective for these residents to have St. Charles provide the sanitary sewer service at the time the intergovernmental agreement was implemented, Van Gyseghem said.

The full list of utility changes is available on the city’s website at www.geneva.il.us.

The City Council will take final action on the changes.