Notes: ECUA 5.21.08 – Walker was there

The May 21 ECUA Citizen’s Advisory Committee meeting opened with a short member forum and ended with an informative update about the replacement of the downtown sewer plant.
Board chair Lois Benson asked, “When we acted as a board last time regarding the recycling proposal we did not adopt a fee schedule, is that true? We simply adopted the proposed schedule.”

Staff Advisor Stephen Sorrell answered, “Yes ma’am, that’s correct. We gave you an estimated fee schedule and also sent our flyers to all our customers giving them an estimated fee
indicating the final fee will be adopted by the board. And there may be some modifications to that A new surcharge from the landfill might be added on to that.”

After that, the committee approved the minutes of the April 16 meeting.
The committee then recommended approval of extending the banking service contract for one year with Wachovia and recommended renewing the contract for security guard services, bioassay testing at wastewater treatment plants and replacing the Bayou Marcus PLC devices.

A review of financial reports prompted board member Larry Walker to ask if a rate increase would be necessary this year.

Staff member Debra Buckley responded and said, “I don’t think we’re going to ask for a rate increase this budget year , it may change what we have to ask for nest year to meet revenue.”
Board member Dale Perkins added, “I was concerned about old water meters. They say old water meters lose speed over the years and when somebody thinks their water meter isn’t reading correctly and we replace it, the new one runs faster. How much do we estimate that the old meters lose in speed?”

Staff member Steve Burgess responded, “The estimates we got from the people who were putting the new meters in have said that it should increase your revenue anywhere from 3 to 8 percent.”

Perkins said the meter replacements could create a cushion of funding. “With all the new meters we have going in, we’re going to see more water revenue because we’re going to have accurate readings. All these 30-year-old meters were just running slow. That’s going to give us some cushion, a lot of cushion.”

Burgess said 18-month long replacement contract has replaced 5,500 so far, and will eventually install about 80,000 meters.

Walker said because the board is approximately halfway through the budget year, that most budgeted expenses should be near 50 percent of the yearly totals and was curious why risk management had already spent more than 99 percent of its budget.

Burgess responded, saying, “We went back and looked at some of the liability claims. This year we have paid five claims that were incurred in ‘07. We’ve had to pay one this year that’s over $84,000. Those claims that we incurred last year weren’t settled out and a couple of them were sizable claims.”

Before the meeting drew to a close, Sorrell updated members with the latest bids for the replacement of the downtown sewer treatment facility.

“We’re really making a lot of progress on this plant relocation and replacement at this time,” he said. “The board agenda next week is going to be just full of major bid awards associated with that project. Just to give you a brief summary the South Transmission range bid recently and that will be on your agenda. The low bidder on that is Utility Services, right here in Pensacola, for $4,999,999.99. Lift station A is going to be on there. That a huge lift station. That’s about a $10 million lift station. Before I go on, let me digress a little bit, the southern transmission section will be about $200,000 under what we anticipated. Lift Station A – Morgan Construction got that bid. That came in about $1 million over what we expected. Yesterday we had the bid opening for the new plant itself, The Central Water Reclamation Facility. They were very close bids. We anticipate bids between $110 million and $115 million and they came in right around $102 million so we saved about $10 million right there. We’ve already awarded the bid for the property clearing and we saved about a half a million there and that went to a local company also. The other thing we did yesterday was the central transmission range section, that’s a very large section. We anticipate the bids to come in about $22 million and they came in at $20.7.”

“Right now it looks like we’re going to be very close to what we projected. Some things could change. There’s going to be change orders and there’s going to be problems.”