The Champaign City Council voted 7-2 to increase the city’s sanitary sewer fee by six percent for billing year 2014 at its Tuesday meeting.  

The sanitary sewer fee rate would rise to $3.02 per average daily cubic feet of water usage from the current $2.85 rate. The amount homeowners or businesses pay for the sanitary fee would depend on how much water they used. 

The sanitary sewer fee provides resources for improved sanitary sewer operation, maintenance and rehabilitation in lieu of tax increases. 

As a homeowner who has had a sanitary sewer backup in her basement, Deborah Frank Feinen, council member at-large, said that the additional fee is more than worth it. 

“The cost to an individual when there is a backup is significantly more than three dollars,” Feinen said. 

It was estimated that sanitary sewer expenditure costs will increase approximately 3.5 percent annually in 2014 and 2015. Without the sanitary sewer fee rate increase, services would need to be decreased annually by approximately $90,000. 

While District 5 council member Paul Faraci worried that businesses would transfer additional costs on to customers, others stated that the rate increase was simply a matter of paying bills. 

“The burden transfers logically to the consumers of sewer services,” said Thomas Bruno, Champaign Deputy Mayor.  “And it will get passed along from the city’s costs and passed to the people who are in need of water systems. They in turn pass it along pro rata to their customer base.”

Following the sanitary sewer fee, the council also approved the annual 10-year Capital Improvements Plan, 9-0.

According to the budget memo, the purpose of the 10-year CIP is to allocate limited resources in accordance with council policies and priorities, and to balance expenditures across different types of projects and infrastructure systems. The CIP includes 146 projects totaling over $349 million in expenditures from 2013 to 2023. 

District 1 council member William Kyles encouraged attracting minority businesses for the CIP projects.

“Construction is one of the things that has greatest opportunities to see minority involvement,” Kyles said.

The council also approved 2013-2014 fiscal year Economic Development activity budget, 8-0. The total funding for activities is $1,215,298 but does not yet reflect funds that will be rebudgeted from the 2012-2013 fiscal year.  

One part of the budget focuses on expansion opportunities for the city. One of these opportunities was the transition of Urbana-Champaign Big Broadband (UC2B) into a stand-alone non-profit entity. 

UC2B is a high-speed fiber optic infrastructure that allows users to surf the Internet at fast rates.  Once it becomes a stand-alone non-profit, it will run independently from the city so that attention can be turned to re-branding the city around this new asset. 

Feinen thanked the staff for including funds for UC2B in the plan. 

“Right now we have an asset that almost no other communities in the United States have,” Feinen said. “That will not be true for long, and we have an opportunity to market our community in a way that we won’t have in the future.”

Karyna can be reached at [email protected] and @K_C_Rodriguez.