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Saturday, Aug. 09, 2008

Cambria’s water, sewer rates may climb after failed protest

Ratepayers miss the required number of signatures to halt fees

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A protest movement has narrowly failed to stop the second attempt at increasing Cambria’s water and sewer rates, so those fees likely will be approved next week.

The letters of protest missed the mark by a margin of less than 2 percent, the Cambria Community Services District announced Friday afternoon.

Ratepayers in the water-starved North Coast town sent about 2,500 letters by July 14. The district spent the following three weeks validating signatures and other data.

The district says it needs the increases in order to help make its water and sewer systems financially self-sufficient and to pay for system improvements.

A complicated count

The count was protracted in part because the district has

several unusual multifamily living situations that made the tally more complex, according to district legal counsel Art Montandon.

In one, for instance, a water service account serves 15 parcels. Another has 26 water accounts on one parcel.

The district has 3,999 accounts and serves 3,929 parcels of property, according to information released Friday. Under the state’s Proposition 218, a successful protest would have needed objections from 50 percent plus one.

Tallying by accounts, the district’s count shows 1,965 valid protests of the 2,001 required, or short by 36.

Counting by parcels served, the district’s tally shows 1,939 valid protests, 27 short of the 1,966 required.

“There was no single, fair way to interpret that without disenfranchising somebody,” Montandon said, “so I asked that the count be done both ways. In both cases, the protest didn’t succeed,” albeit by a “pretty small margin.”

At the district’s Aug. 21 board meeting, observers from the League of Women Voters are expected to certify the tally as accurate.

The margin was so close that the district had the county Clerk-Recorder’s Office examine signatures on every letter — even on duplicates — and compare them against digitized original signatures in voting records.

Count to be contested

Some members of Cambrians for Fiscal Responsibility, which organized the protest campaign, are ready to contest the count. Participants from the citizens group acted as observers in the early stages of the tally.

“We will want to go through every single invalidated protest. We want to know why and who was considered invalid,” organizer Tina Dickason said at a group meeting Wednesday night.

In the end, she said, “we hope we’ll have a community that will come together, because we certainly are divided.”

Montandon had offered to review each disallowed vote with the group after the count was certified, and he reiterated that pledge shortly before the tally results were released.

Some members of the citizens group have said the services district should go back to the disqualified objectors to verify that they did, indeed, sign letters bearing their names.

But Montandon called that “a recipe for fraud” that would not be allowed in any election procedure.

What’s next

At the Aug. 21 meeting, the district’s board likely will consider approving the rate increases and applying for an $8.1 million loan for projects and reserve accounts.

If the board approves the package in a resolution, rather than an ordinance, the rate increase could go into effect immediately, Montandon said.

However, the practical application probably would begin in the next billing period, which starts about Sept. 1, and would show up on ratepayers’ bimonthly bills in November.

Under the proposed rate fees, bimonthly bills would increase in two stages for a compounded total of nearly 28 percent.

A bimonthly bill for 12 units of water and sewer use, now $129.90, would rise to $145.45 next month and to $165.74 on July 1, 2009. A unit is 748 gallons. Consumption of 12 units per billing period is considered average use.

In November, a similar protest by ratepayers halted a larger increase recommended by a district consultant. More than 3,550 letters were submitted; 2,266 were deemed valid.

This time, at least one board member will urge his peers to go slowly in approving the loan portion of the package.

Muril Clift said that even though the latest protest didn’t succeed, the margin was close and a substantial percentage of the town’s ratepayers objected.

The board should avoid the “we won, you lost” attitude, he said, but instead should “take it slowly and do projects piecemeal, if we need to. We’re not going to spend all this money tomorrow anyway.”

Reach Kathe Tanner at 927-8895.