Council passes $6 increase in sewer bill, drops tree fee

Spokane sewer customers will pay nearly $6 a month more for wastewater service in 2012, but they won’t have to pay more to support city trees.

The Spokane City Council on Monday approved a 13.5 percent increase in wastewater fees, taking residential bills to $49.64 a month. The city expects to propose similar increases in the next few years in large part to pay for about $450 million in sewer upgrades required by the state to be completed by 2017.

Supporters of the increase said the city must make progress on the projects that the city agreed to in its current wastewater discharge permit.

“We need to get that sewage out of the river,” Councilwoman Amber Waldref said.

Opponents say the deadline is too strict, especially because of the economic downturn.

“It’s absurd for the Department of Ecology to believe that in this time of recession that they can expect local governments to impose these over-the-top increases on our citizens,” said City Councilwoman Nancy McLaughlin, who was on her way to an Association of Washington Cities meeting with Gov. Chris Gregoire and missed Monday night’s meeting.

Like many cities, a large portion of Spokane, mostly on the South Side, has sewer lines that function as both sanitary and storm sewers. When it rains, the system often gets backed up and untreated sewage is piped directly to the river.

To solve that problem, the city is building a series of giant tanks to hold overflow until it can be sent to the treatment plant.

The city also is working to significantly improve treatment at its main plant in large part to cut the amount of phosphorus discharged into the river.

City Councilman Bob Apple, who along with Steve Corker voted against the increase, questioned the construction of the tanks.

“It’s supposedly going to be doing a good thing but we won’t know because we won’t see them because they will be buried under the ground,” Apple said.

The council removed a proposed 25 cent monthly fee that would have been added to bills to pay for the city’s urban forestry department. The fee would have raised about $200,000. Instead, the council voted to task the city’s wastewater department to pay up to $250,000 for a study to inventory the city’s public trees. Money will be diverted from funds that otherwise would have been used for experimental or alternative stormwater projects like systems recently built along Lincoln Street on the South Hill or Broadway Avenue in West Central.

The study, some council members said, would help them decide in future years if a stormwater fee for trees is justified.

City administrators say planting more trees could help reduce the need to build more stormwater infrastructure.

The city’s last tree inventory was finished in 1996, just before ice storm, which significantly damaged trees throughout the city.