Push Continues for Change to Sewer Billing

A local developer is continuing to lead an effort to change how the University Area Joint Authority bills residents and businesses for sewer service.

Dating back 15 years, Tom Songer II, president of the Torron Group, has been advocating for volumetric billing based on water usage for customers in College, Ferguson, Harris and Patton townships. State College Borough, which is served by UAJA but does its own sewage billing, has been charging customers volumetrically for more than 40 years. Halfmoon Township’s wastewater treatment is separate from UAJA.

Volumetric billing incentivizes water conservation and is a fair method for charging customers, Songer said.

‘This isn’t a tough decision,’ he said. ‘It’s about doing the right thing to conserve water, lower our carbon footprint and have people pay for what they use.’

For decades, UAJA has billed township customers based on Equivalent Dwelling Units (EDU), so a single family home, regardless of size or how many people live there, pays $104 quarterly for sewer service. For non-residential buildings, a location is charged a minimum of one EDU, with additional EDUs assessed for factors such as the number of businesses in a building and the capacity and type of business.

Songer said that households pay for water based on how much they use, but for sewer, under the current system, a home with one person using 50 gallons of water a day, pays the same cost as a family using 250 gallons of water a day. Apartment units are considered one EDU, regardless of whether they are one-, two-, three-, or four-bedrooms.

‘If you use less water, you generate less sewage,’ he said.

Businesses, meanwhile, are assessed EDUs at varying rates. An office building is charged one EDU for every business with one to 10 employees. Songer said this means that if an office building has 10 businesses with one employee each, the building owner would pay 10 EDUs. But a building with one business with 10 employees would be assessed one EDU. 

Other billing practices for businesses don’t make much sense, Songer said. For example a bowling alley is charged one EDU for every six lanes and a restaurant is charged one EDU for every 15 seats, regardless of how long it is open or what type of restaurant it is.

About 200 people have signed the most recent petition at uajapetition.com calling for the billing change. 

In State College, customers pay a base sewer rate of $28.05 for 3,000 gallons of water, then $9.35 for every 1,000 gallons after that. Songer said that though the borough has grown, its water usage in the past 15 years has declined by 17 percent.

‘This works well in the Borough of State College, so why not implement it in the UAJA service area?’ Songer said. ‘Why shouldn’t customers of UAJA pay for their sewer service based on water meter readings like it is done in the borough?’

Volumetric billing is common in many areas, especially those where water and sewer are under the same authority. Though water and sewer won’t be brought under the same authority in the Centre Region, Songer said the State College and College Township water authorities would do the billing and send UAJA their share for sewer service.

‘You don’t have to do a lot of studies. It’s just a matter of going through the numbers to make sure whatever your minimum is plus the rate you’re going to charge for water meter readings gives you enough income to run the system,’ Songer said.

He added that for customers that use water for purposes such as swimming pools and irrigation that don’t discharge into the sewer system, a submeter to remove that from the sewage bill could be used. He also said the technology is available to install meters that can detect leaks. While now a customer would pay for water usage caused by a leak on their water bill, their sewer bill still remains the same even though excess water is being sent into the system.

Songer has in past years and as recently as 2017 presented to the Centre Region Council of Governments requesting that it update the regional Act 537 sewage disposal plan to mandate a change in UAJA’s billing practices.

Corey Miller, UAJA executive director, said that the authority’s position is that volumetric billing is something that should be done only after a comprehensive water plan as part of a larger, integrated water plan is completed. 

‘You don’t have to do that, but in order to get the maximum benefit of water conservation it all needs to be done as part of the same plan, otherwise it’s kind of like throwing darts at a board,’ Miller said. ‘You don’t know what is the best solution for water conservation if you don’t look at the whole problem.’

Miller said the Spring Creek Watershed Commission recently took the first steps to begin that planning, which will hopefully be completed in one to two years.

ClearWater Conservancy has advocated for a comprehensive water plan for the region, but representatives did not return requests for comment about whether the conservancy supports volumetric billing specifically as a conservation measure. In an email to Songer, a ClearWater board member said the conservancy does not oppose it and that it should be a topic of discussion for regional water planning.

Songer also suggested that for those concerned about the potential Nestle Waters bottling plant being considered for Spring or Benner townships, the water conservation spurred by volumetric billing could offset the usage by Nestle.

Miller, meanwhile, said that what the water usage billing method does not take into account is that sewage is composed not just of water, but what’s in the water. The cost of treating sewage is more related to what’s in the water than the volume of water, he said.

‘If you have 20 people in a building and you install water conservation fixtures, we have the same mass of pollutants to remove from those 20 people as we did before the water conservation fixtures are there,’ Miller said.

He added that there isn’t an economical way to measure the mass of pollutants in sewage coming from a building.

‘We can spend $7,000 installing a meter on each connection, but that’s kind of crazy,’ Miller said.

Songer, though, said the EDU billing method is antiquated and a relic from when current systems were constructed more than 50 years ago.

‘Many municipalities that’s what they did, because what they had to do out of the gate was assure the bondholders of their debt that they had enough revenue coming in to pay their bills, and this was the easiest way to do that,’ Songer said. ‘Once the system gets to be mature after 20 years or so then you look at charging people for what they use. This has gone on for almost 50 years.’

The issue of adopting volumetric billing locally pre-dates Songer’s efforts. In 1996, UAJA commissioned Gary Shambaugh, managing consultant for AUS Consultants, to study the billing method. Shambaugh wrote at the time that the nationwide trend was to establish rates based on the service provided and that the EDU method was from a time when metered water use was not readily available.

‘Why shouldn’t people pay for what they use?’ Songer said. ‘We pay for what we use with electric, gas, water… why shouldn’t it be the same for sewer service?

‘For any progressive sewer authority, this is the way to do it.’