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City Council Water & Sewer Subcommittee March 25, 2003 Page 7 about those that are proposed and not yet adopted. Mr. Campbell said the .03 turbidity requirement is already in place now and the city does not know what maximum capacity the plant can meet at this time. He said that is the big problem, because the plant is peaking out at 20.5 million and the city does not know how much above that the plant can go. Mr. Campbell said this is called design criteria and Freese and Nichols will calculate that figure. He added that the state requires Paris to have a certain capacity. Paris must have a capacity greater than the maximum day. If you do not have that greater capacity the state will make you build extra capacity; probably through an administrative order. Mr. Campbell reported that when the plant was modified in 1994, the city changed the way they operated. Previously, if people needed more water the city had to increase the pumps at the Water Treatment Plant which drew more water through the plant and surged the filters. He said they built a four million gallon ground storage tank and built four more pumps at ground storage, so all the water for the plant goes out at a steady rate. Then if there is a need for more water, another pump is turned on at ground storage and this has no effect on the water treatment plant. Mr. Campbell stated that another consideration is that at this time Pat Mayse Lake has a minimum safety of 55 million gallons a day. Paris currently has the right to purchase all of that water in 11 million gallon increments a day; the city has to pay for this. There is a day coming, if the city does not keep the plant up to size, that the city will lose some of those water rights. Councilwoman Neeley asked Mr. Anderson if the city could do a rate study more often than every three years. Mr. Anderson advised that for some time he had advocated doing an annual rate study because circumstances can change rapidly enough to adversely affect the city financially. The past two or three years has proven that to be the case. Jack Stowe had mentioned in his presentation that the city had under collected about $600,000.00 for one year because the city did not update annually. Chairman Plata made the statement that rate increases should be the last thing the city does. A rate increase is good because the city will recoup the money