No refund coming for county sewer customers

The check is not in the mail.

That’s the word for any Spokane County sewer customers who may have expected a refund when city of Spokane officials recently agreed to forgive some $800,000 in utility taxes.

The city had been applying its 20 percent utility tax on the county’s bill for use of the city sewage treatment plant. County officials built the charge into the rates they charged county sewer customers.

City officials said they were entitled to collect the tax under a 1980 agreement with the county, but county officials quit paying it in November 2003. It wasn’t fair for county residents to have to pay about $1 a month for city operations unrelated to sewage treatment, county officials argued in a lawsuit.

The dispute was settled last month with an agreement in which county officials gave up two of the six years’ worth of reimbursement they had sought, and city officials gave up about $800,000 of the money the county had withheld.

County Utilities Director Bruce Rawls said county sewer customers won’t receive any of the $800,000 because it was eaten up by inflation.

Rawls said money that might have gone to the city of Spokane since November 2003 was used instead to reduce the need for annual county sewer rate increases of perhaps 50 cents a month. Even so, he said, inflation of 2.5 percent to 3 percent has outstripped the windfall.

Consequently, customers will get a rate increase now instead of a refund. And because the county is building a $106 million sewage treatment plant, the increase will be “substantial,” Rawls said.

A rate study, expected to be completed in July, tentatively recommends a 21 percent increase of $5.79 cents a month next year in residential sewer bills. Residential bills would rise to $33.47 next year, and a series of additional increases proposed in the study would bring the monthly total to $39.48 in 2013.

The increases would be even higher if it weren’t for the utility tax settlement, which calls for the tax to be reduced in increments and eliminated after 2021. The rate will be 15 percent through 2011, 10 percent from 2012 through 2016 and 5 percent from 2017 through 2021.