Monday’s Rockdale City Council session was a meeting of “won’ts.”
• There won’t be a water rate increase this spring.
• The city won’t buy water from Blue Water, as it decided to do last December.
• The council won’t call an election to see if voters want to transfer a half-cent sales tax from the Municipal Development District (MDD) to the Rockdale Hospital District.
A new water fee matrix has made what was thought to be a set-in-stone rate hike not necessary, at least until the situation gets reviewed in the fall.
The council experienced buyer’s regret over the Blue Water idea after looking at the fine print.
Multiple attorney opinions convinced the council they could not legally call an election to transfer the sales tax to an entity not connected with the city.
WATER RATES—Yearly increases in water rates—there were huge ones in 2019—were thought to be “baked into” a long-range $48-million project to essentially replace the city’s entire system.
But advisor Matthew Garrett of Next Gen Strategies, outlined a presentation via phone call during the meeting. It should provide some relief for Rockdale rate payers, at least for a few months.
Garrett said a new procedure for multi-family dwellings would satisfy requirements of the Texas Water Development Board by treating each inhabitant of a multi-family dwelling as a separate connection for billing purposes.
He estimated a $129,000 in additional revenue.
The council approved the fee change.
BLUE BLUES—The entire project appears to be in flux and that could ultimately benefit ratepayers.
“You’ve got a lot of things working in your favor,” Garrett said.
The council decided not to purchase water from Blue Water after Mayor John King, in a Thursday workshop, outlined a number of factors which had come to light since December.
King said the Blue project—which would have brought drinking-quality water to Rockdale without treatment—appears to be more expensive for the city than first anticipated.
King said it’s possible the city would owe money not just to Blue Water, but also to Southwest Milam Water Supply Corporation and that the city, and its ratepayers, might end up paying water transport fees.
“It looks to be 65 cents more per 1,000 gallons than using our wells and building our own new water treatment plant,” King said.
“Also, there’s no redundancy in case of emergency,” he added. “The water would be coming from only one well.
The council authorized City Manager Chris Whittaker to procure information on engineering the water system replacement project through loans from the U. S. Dept. of Agriculture instead of the TWDB.
Council members also discussed the possibility of providing some fee relief for senior citizens.
NO VOTE—In the council’s Thursday workshop, King had told members that attorneys had indicated the council could not hold a sales tax transfer election as requested by a 206-signature petition in January.
He said the key point is that the city has no legal relationship with the hospital district.
“We could call it if we had a purpose to go to that’s ours (City of Rockdale),” King said. “We can’t call an election to move it (sales tax) from one entity to another entity in town that’s not part of the city.”
Dick Burns, former hospital board member, maintained the city has that authority through its charter to call such an election, citing balloting in 2009 and 2010.
Chad Harris of Whinstone, which is building the largest facility of its kind on Alcoa property, strongly praised the MDD saying “Whinstone would not be here today” without its assistance.
The council rejected the petition in a unanimous vote.
A separate vote to not hold an election reallocating the sales tax, without specifying where it would go, passed on a 4-2 vote with council members Richard Coppedge and Denise Holmes-Wallace voting against.
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