22 - City of Toco Wastewater Bill

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("WWTP") project. It appears, based on the payments being made; the amount Toco was paying did not increase even though the monthly bill was increasing. ATTACHMENTS D AND E. STATUS OF ISSUE: Paris staff reached out to Toco representatives earlier this year to discuss the growing delinquency in the bill. After some time, I was brought in. Paris cannot continue to allow the growing delinquency to occur, particularly given 1) the WWTP project is underway and 2) other utility ratepayers have to subsidize the delinquent amount owed to treat the wastewater. Our mission is to seek fairness for all ratepayers and have everyone pay for their own account balance. In the course of meeting with the Toco representatives, we learned of Toco's arrangement with its citizens. It is our understanding that the City of Toco pays for all of its residents' water, wastewater, and trash bills. Their sources of revenue to cover this is a natural gas franchise fee, liquor store sales, and donations. However, this revenue has been insufficient to cover all three bills, which has led to Paris' full bill going unpaid. On September 27, 2022, Mayor Paula Portugal, Gene Anderson and I met with the Mayor and a Council Member of the City of Toco to discuss this issue. This led to a meeting between Mayor Paula Portugal, Mayor Pro Tem Reginald Hughes, Rob Vine, Gene Anderson, myself and the entire Toco City Council on November 10, 2022. Both meetings went very well as the City of Toco recognizes that it cannot continue to be delinquent with their sewer bills. They were eager to develop a solution to prevent this from escalating further. We discussed several options and ultimately agreed to the proposal written below. I_1-8 Lei W`►i ICSINTAaa Under statute of limitations, we recognize that we may be prevented from collecting delinquent debt older than four years. The owed amount today for the last four years is therefore approximately $80,000.00 - $85,000.00 (depending on recent bills). PROPOSALS The City of Toco City Council acknowledges that they are not in a position to raise the needed funding to pay the sewer bill nor keep up with the monthly payments. Therefore, they have requested assistance in developing an option whereby their residents will begin to pay on individual accounts. The City of Toco will continue to pay for water and trash services for all residents, but sewer will need to be offloaded to the residents. Given LCWSD provides water to a master meter for the City of Toco, and the City of Toco is in charge of their own water infrastructure after the master meter, and given the age of the existing water meters within their infrastructure (we have deemed these to be unreliable due to age and lack of known maintenance), one option was to bill each individual resident/business on a pro -rata