Politics & Government

SP Council to Extend Sewer Bill Deadline

The mayor proposed the change after hearing complaints about the original due date.

The Scotch Plains Township Council is slated to postpone the payment deadline for the new sewer bill to the end of November.

The mayor and council discussed the move during their Tuesday night conference meeting after being flooded with complaints from residents, businesses and non-profits who felt the original deadline of Oct. 1 gave them little time to pay the new bill. The bill was sent to Scotch Plains mailboxes the first week in September.

The Oct. 1 deadline was originally set because state statute requires bills to be paid within 25 days after they’ve been mailed, with a 10 day grace period. But because a host of unforeseen issues have arisen since mailing the bills, the council agreed it was best to delay the deadline to give people more time to pay it.

“I had hoped we’d done enough to talk about this and make people aware of it, but I thought it was the right thing to do to give people more time,” Mayor Nancy Malool said.

Next Tuesday, the mayor and council will vote to approve a resolution to push the Oct. 1 deadline back to at least Nov. 20, with a 10-day grace period until Nov. 30. Any payments received after that date will accrue the same interest charged to late tax payments.

The township’s chief financial officer, Lori Majeski, said that the majority of payments that have been received so far have been from residents, who were billed a flat rate of $250 this year if they live in a single-family home, and $180 if they reside in a townhouse or condo.

Majeski said residents’ bills make up about two-thirds, or $1.7 million, of the total sewer costs. Businesses and non-profits make up the remaining one-third.

Businesses, non-profits and houses of worship were all billed according to their water usage this year, using a formula that charged them $175 for the first 27,500 gallons of water, and 1 cent for every gallon used afterward.

But Township Manager Chris Marion admitted Tuesday night that out of the 300 of them, about 30 received incorrect bills due to miscalculations of their water bills. The problem, he said, arose because there was an issue transferring data from New Jersey American Water to the township’s system. Assistant Engineer Joesph Timko acknowledged that some groups actually received a bill that was double what they should have gotten. The YMCA and Board of Education were among those to question their bills.

Marion said he and the finance department have been meeting with individual organizations to work through the errors. Malool asked him to call each of those 30 businesses and non-profits to notify them of the mistakes. A resolution will be passed next week to officially alter those bills.

Still, for the businesses and non-profits whose bills were actually correct, concerns still exist. Some are frustrated that they received charges that were higher than they expected and that they were unable to budget for.

A discussion followed about whether the new bill could have been better publicized, but Malool countered that the township only found out the specific charges a few weeks prior to the bill being mailed. She said she wanted to put a note that the bill was on its way in the fall newsletter sent to residents, but recently found out that the town manager had eliminated the fall newsletter to save money.

She also stated that she met with the Ministerium, JCC, YMCA and Board of Education in the spring to tell them that the bill would be coming. Non-profits and the school district previously did not pay for their sewage treatment since it was included in property taxes, from which they are exempt.

“The schools, nonprofits, churches–they don’t pay taxes, and that equals to about several hundred thousand dollars in sewer charges paid by the homeowners,” Malool said. “We felt that if we were going to do this equitably, we needed to include everybody. … The non-profits definitely aren’t happy because they don’t pay taxes, but we feel like this was an exception we can do.”

Several residents showed up at the meeting Tuesday night to voice their concerns. One, Victor Devizio, said that he felt the new sewer bill was a way for the township to “skate around the issue” of trying to stay under the state’s mandated tax levy cap.

“I know tough choices had to be made, but it feels disingenuous that the state imposed a cap and we didn’t meet it, so we made another bill,” Devizio said.

Malool explained that the majority of the council approved the sewer bill because they felt it was the only effective way to remove money from the budget to bring it under cap. The township was hit with a $521,000 increase in sewer charges from the Rahway Valley Sewer Authority this year, along with several non-discretionary costs and mandates from the state. Taking the sewer fees out of the taxes eliminated about $2.5 million from the budget. The township also cut spending by another $500,000 and eliminated eight positions to get it under cap.

“We’re not trying to pass this through as, ‘hey, we lowered taxes, but here’s this bill,’” Malool said. “We had to do this sewer bill because it was the only responsible way to get under cap.”

Scotch Plains’ budget consultant for 2009, Greg Fehrenbach, is the one who suggested the township create the sewer utility. He has been invited to next Tuesday’s council meeting to answer any questions that attendees may have.

It remains to be seen how the sewer bills will affect next year’s budget, chief financial officer Majeski said. She admitted that the postponed deadline will put her in a time crunch for mailing out delinquency notices to those who don’t meet it. She said that any payments not collected by the end of the year will have to be picked up by the township next year.

Next year, residents will be billed according to their water usage, just like businesses and non-profits were this year. Malool said the bill will be calculated by taking residents’ water bills from September, October, November and December and multiply that to get an assessment of how much water from their house went to the sewage treatment facility that year. Malool said they use those months, instead of the rate from the entire year, because a lot of the water used during the summer for pools and lawns goes into the storm sewer and not to the sewage treatment facility.

Malool made it clear that the sewer bill covers water treatment charges for the entire year, not quarterly like some have believed. It will only be issued to residents once.

Another issue raised was whether the township finance office will have enough staff to process the billing and payments in the future. Majeski acknowledged that the department is overwhelmed right now, but that they are handling the job. Earlier this year when she said that she believed the department had enough personnel to handle the workload, the department had four individuals on staff. Because one of those staffers has since died, the council said they would consider the suggestion that a part-time clerk may have to be hired in the future.

Marion re-emphasized that he and those in the finance department are available to meet with residents, businesses and non-profits that want to discuss the sewer bill further. He also stated the he’ll be updating the sewer bill "frequently asked questions" document on the township’s Web site. Marion can be reached at 908-322-6700.


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