The city of Austin could change the way residents pay for sewer access.

Public Works Director Steven Lang updated the Austin City Council during its Monday work session on the city’s efforts to create a sewer access fee. The fee structure comes as city officials work on one upcoming sewer project and tries to figure out how to deal with the former Lansing Township sewer project completed in 2011.

Several property owners affected by the Lansing Sewer Project were at the meeting Monday and Lang explained how the fee, an up-front lump sum charge, would be paid by property owners or developers before work even took place. Though the city has yet to figure out how much the fee would cost, Lang said the council would likely set fee rates at the beginning of each year.

“When someone wants to hook into the sanitary sewer system, there’s lots of things they’re connecting to that other people have already paid for, and we have the continuing ongoing maintenance of that that will continue into the future,” Lang said.

The fee is tiered and would affect residents who need to get sewer access stubs up to their property line, to the property itself and to existing structures on the property. It’s meant to replace assessments for sewer work, which under state statute must benefit the property, must be levied at the same rate for all properties involved in a project, and must not cost owners more than the benefit to the property.
Yet several former Lansing residents expressed concern with the fee.
“We’re gonna get rooked,” one owner whispered during the meeting.
Mower County District Judge Donald Rysavy overturned the $15,000-per-parcel assessments to three property owners in March of 2013. Those three owners held land that was part of the 209.5 parcels of land annexed into Austin in 2009 to get connected to the city’s sewer system.
Rysavy wrote in his ruling it was unreasonable to conclude the properties would benefit from the sewer project when those landowners showed their properties decreased in value every year since 2009.
As a result of the ruling, the city of Austin withdrew assessments on 30 other contested properties in spring 2013 as well.
It isn’t known if the sewer access fee will be instated retroactively, however. Lang said city staff are still working on the sewer access fee policy, which the council has yet to formally approve.