Customers of the sewer treatment plant have a monthly base charge of $10 and pay a usage rate of $7.65 per 1,000 gallons. But somehow when the rate structure was put into the billing system, Stephens said, the first 1,000 gallons was incorrectly included in the base fee. Customers therefore were not charged for their first 1,000 gallons of sewer use.
The treatment plants serves 15 residential customers and 10 commercial customers, said Stephens. It also serves publicly-owned buildings such as the high school – but Stephens said the $17,000 total did not include the money lost from undercharging customers in publicly-owned buildings.
“Just about everybody has been under-billed,” Stephens told supervisors. He said while doing routine data checking on bills, he noticed that the numbers didn’t add up. Stephens, who did not work for Fluvanna when this system was implemented, said that he didn’t know how the error had occurred. Since the Fork Union Sanitary District includes a certain amount of usage in its base rate, Stephens said his best guess was that someone made an incorrect assumption that billing for the Palmyra Area Wastewater Treatment Plant worked the same way.
Starting in July customer bills will be computed accurately and will include a notice with information about the error. Most customers will see a $7.65 increase in their monthly bills.
Stephens said that the county would not retroactively bill customers for the mistake.
In other matters:
• Supervisors voted to reimburse Melissa and Tony Hutcherson, residents of Taylor Ridge Estates, for the $6,750 fee the couple paid to the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT) in order to complete the process of having the Taylor Ridge roads accepted into the state system. Supervisor Don Weaver was the only dissenting vote. “This is just another expenditure that the county, as I understand it, wasn’t required to pay,” he said.
• Cheryl Elliott, emergency services coordinator, facilitated several change orders to the E911 radio system which will turn it from a seven-site to a six-site system, which she said will provide the county with “even better coverage” than the former plan.
• County Administrator Steve Nichols told supervisors that the cost recovery program in which the county bills for ambulance transport has yielded $249,000 so far with three months remaining in the fiscal year. “The program honestly is going very well,” Nichols said, and will exceed projections of collecting $250,000 in its first year.
