2020-10-27_PWETC_Minutes - Laserfiche WebLink

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Member Spencer asked if staff has ever looked at having St. Paul take over the water infrastructure. Mr. Culver indicated he has looked back at some information for this question. He noted Roseville currently buys its water from the St. Paul Regional Water Authority and the reason why it is called that is because that authority provides water as the water provider to many other cities besides St. Paul. Maplewood is a good example. He believed ten or so years ago the City of Maplewood sold their water system to the City of St. Paul for $1 and the City of St. Paul took it over and essentially became the water utility for the City of Maplewood. That means the St. Paul Regional Water Authority bills everybody in Maplewood for their water and the meters that are in the residents' homes are owned by the St. Paul Regional Water Authority, not the City of Maplewood. When a watermain break happens in Maplewood, St. Paul Regional Water Authority fixes it. Roseville can do the same thing and have not had any detailed or serious conversations with St. Paul Water in quite sometime about that possibility. Mr. Culver presented a spreadsheet to show what the residents would pay for given the different scenarios. He noted particularly if under the twenty -thousand -gallon level a resident can save money if St. Paul was providing that service. This does not analyze the apartments or commercial users and staff would have to do a more in-depth analysis to see what the total impact would be to all of the customers. There are two really strong factors outside of cost to the customers that staff needs to consider for the City of Roseville. One is coordination of what streets will be worked on in any given year along with the infrastructure of utilities under those streets. Staff has the flexibility to program its own watermain and everything else because the City operates that utility. If St. Paul Water operates the City utility then the City loses some of that flexibility. The other factor is personnel for winter maintenance. Currently, the majority of the utility staff is used for plowing streets during a snow event. If we lost half or more of the staff in that division we would have to find other personnel to backfill the plow routes. Member Joyce asked when Ehlers was doing the analysis, were the fund balances for this bond multiple years. Mr. Culver indicated the bond repayment would be over ten years. Vice Chair Huiett thought in regard to the two Ehlers options, both options do represent a more fair and equitable distribution of costs and consumption passing along to the users. She felt that both options represent strong consideration for making the behavior changes that the City and residents really want. She sensed that option two might do that a little differently as far as cost because some of the fixed costs and the base rate are built in differently. It does provide that greater Page 4 of 7