10-12-11 Council Agenda - Laserfiche WebLink

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test. The fee will be applied to the resident's utility bill and the resident will sign a form acknowledging his awareness of the fee being added to the utility bill. If the meter test proves the meter is over 5% fast then the testing fee paid by the resident will be refunded and he will be credited the full amount of the under - registered water if the difference was between 0- 50,000 gallons and credited 50,000 gallons with continued review for one year if it was greater than 50,000 gallons. Therefore, staff is recommending the Council establish the meter testing deposit at $50 to cover the cost of an employee for one hour to perform the test plus additional processing time at City Hall. The letter will also state that meters rarely speed up and that there has never been a case of a meter that sped up in the City. The current water ordinance states that in the event the meter tests fast, the testing fee will be refunded, the meter replaced (which will have already been done in these cases), and the account will be adjusted for one billing period. In the interest of equity, staff believes the same policy should be used for refunding accounts as will be used for under - registering accounts. The City will keep all meters that have a discrepancy of 10,000 gallons or more. If the remote is not removed a picture will be taken with a date stamp so there is a record of the meter and remote readings if a resident disputes the final bill. There will actually be two different letters. One letter will he sent to the 0- 50,000 gallon group and a different one will be sent to the 50,000+ group. Each will spell out the different options involved for that particular group. Under- registered Water Billing Rate Staff needs direction on what rate to bill the under - registered water. Staff recommends taking the average of the 2011 winter and summer rates and using that as the rate for billing the under - registered water. Those rates are $2.88 for winter and $2.98 for summer, resulting in an average rate of $2.93. By using this method, we will simplify the calculation process. Springbrook Interface Module Staff will be able to work with the new meter data using the Badger software package that is part of the meter system. All of the readings, leak detection, and other options will be included in the Badger software. Each quarter, once the readings are ready to be billed, they will need to he downloaded to Springbrook, the City's accounting software. Currently, the Utility Billing Clerk manually enters the meter readings into Springbrook. This is estimated to take approximately 4 hours to enter the commercial readings and approximately eight hours to enter the residential readings. The quarterly cost is about $420 plus the Utility Billing Clerk's lost time spent entering the readings. The Springbrook Interface Module costs $3500 to install plus additional training project management fees, and then $875 per year in maintenance fees. The module is necessary 5