SAN ANTONIO – Some SAWS customers feel as though they’re wading through muddy waters trying to get their January 2016 bills corrected.
But this time, its due to a fee that belongs to the city, not SAWS.
“What in the world is this?” asked Shawn Hughes when she examined her January 2016 bill.
Tacked onto her monthly SAWS bill was a $56 stormwater fee.
In previous months, that fee was just two bucks.
“Its unimaginable,” said Hughes. “I don’t use $56 in water usage each month.”
When Hughes began asking her neighbors about their bills, things got even murkier.
One neighbor was also charged the $56 storm water fee but another neighbor in her same Northside townhome complex was charged $4.25 fee.
In January, the city rolled out a new, restructured storm water fee that is collected via SAWS bills.
The fee, which customers have been paying since 1993, is used to manage drainage pollution as required by the Environmental Protection Agency.
The fee facilitates services like street sweeping, lawn mowing and city projects.
Now, the city is basing the storm water fee on how much impervious cover is on a property- that’s anything that can’t absorb water runoff. For example, parking lots and sidewalks.
Residential customers are charged based on the square footage of impervious cover on their properties and those amounts are divided into three tiers.
Thirty percent of non-residential customers saw their stormwater fees either decrease or stay the same." not change at all under the restructuring.
Non-residential customers are also charged based on the amount of impervious cover their property has plus a base fee of $55.77.
“Non-residential properties- you could have the same overall property size but one could be fully paved and have a much different impact on the drainage system,” said Art Reinhardt, Assistant Director of the city’s Transportation and Capital Improvements.
Reinhardt says the billing to Hughes’ complex was a mistake that the city is currently working to correct.
The complex is considered non-residential after this fee restructuring because there are more than two living units per building.
But that $56 fee ought to be shared among each tenant.
"There are 4 tenants per building. In some cases, the entire bill went to each of those four,” Reinhardt said. “So we're working to correct that. It should be the bill for that parcel divided by four.
“We're working on adding a credit or some kind of deduction so they'll be made whole,” he added.
Reinhardt says the new fee is just a few weeks old, so the city is still working out some kinks.
If you feel you’ve been over charged, you’re asked to call the SAWS customer service number on your SAWS bill.
SAWS included information about the new storm water fee in its January newsletter which was distributed with January water bills.
Reinhardt says the most recent notification distributed by the city was in August and Sept. of 2015. That notification was advertised in the San Antonio Express News -- just one month before the city council approved the fee restructuring.