Columbia City Council work session, Tuesday, April 21

By Temple Ligon

COLUMBIA, SC – Council took most of its work session Tuesday afternoon as time to discuss water and sewer rates, but specifically how to extract money from water/sewer systems and put it in the general fund.

Council’s consultants recommend even higher rates sooner, but the coming five years will see water/sewer rate increases every year, eventually hitting a total increase at the end of the next five years of a little more than 47 percent over what’s paid today.

Meanwhile, council can’t fully agree on the transfer of funds from the water/sewer collections to the general fund or to a specific city service.

The idea began at a city council work session in the summer of 1998 when I was invited to speak. I tried to help council find funds to bring the bus system up to a national standard. I suggested the water/sewer service could cost a little more for folks out of the city than in, and the extra funds could be exclusively applied to the bus system, something the outlying population would never have otherwise. I illustrated the idea as what Austin TX did with its municipal electric power system; that is, Austin charged the churches, high schools, University of Texas, federal compound and all of the other tax exempt properties an electric power fee. What in Columbia gets distributed around the world to SCANA’s shareholders stays in Austin to fund the city. The municipal electric power system is also the case in Los Angeles and Orlando and around here in Orangeburg and Rock Hill among many others. Today in Austin that fee for electric power transfers about $158,000,000 to the city’s general fund.

Austin’s residential electric power rates in a small apartment that uses less than 500 kwh per month in the winter come in at 1.8 cents per kwh, while in Columbia the advertised rate for monthly use – no price break for the winter – from 400 kwh to 800 kwh costs 13.1 cents. A monthly use of less than 400 kwh in Columbia costs 10.4 cents per kwh.

To move Columbia from its current electric power system to something like Austin’s is an impossible dream, but it helps council to understand why cities similar to Columbia in many ways still manage a more impressive growth rate with lower taxes.

In 1998, like now, Columbia had just about the worst bus service for a city its size in the country. Council acted on the water/sewer fees idea, but the bus system was never the beneficiary, and the water/sewer systems maintenance programs were weakened to below federal standards.

Mayor Coble and his council used as a slush fund what could have gone to bus transit or even stayed to maintain the water/sewer systems. Council still let SCANA off the hook and out of its contractual obligations to run bus transit as part of its monopoly franchise.

In the past year council has taken $4 million away from the water/sewer revenues. This coming fiscal year council appears bent on taking out a reduced total of $2.6 million and targeting public safety as the sole recipient.

Council member Cameron Runyan called council on the definitions and uses of the water/sewer revenues when the money was directed away from water/sewer maintenance. Runyan is expected to bring to council alternative sources of new revenues with the commitment to meet the federal requirements of $750 million in water/sewer capital improvements over the coming decade.