Public hearing on water rates will go ahead

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This article was published 20/07/2023 (1197 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Brandon City Council declined a proposal from city administration to withdraw a request for a public hearing on proposed water rate increases at Monday’s meeting — meaning the city will hold a public hearing after all.

However, conflicting messages remain about the rationale offered by administration for the proposed withdrawal in the first place.

City administration had said that withdrawing its request for a public hearing on the matter could speed up the timeline for the Public Utilities Board’s decision, but the executive director of the PUB told the Sun on Wednesday that’s not the case.

Last July, the city approved a request to the Public Utilities Board to raise rates on July 1 each year from 2023 to 2026 to help make up for past deficits and pay for current and future infrastructure projects.

These increases would see water and wastewater rates nearly double by the end of that period, but the city has been forced to put those plans on hold with the PUB’s approval yet to be granted.

At Monday’s council meeting, administration said that the city withdrawing the request would leave the ultimate decision of whether to have a public hearing up to the PUB. That means the utilities board could have still requested a hearing, but the city’s director of utilities, Alexia Stangherlin, said it would likely have meant a speedier decision.

However, PUB executive director Darren Christle told the Sun on Wednesday that if the request had been withdrawn, it would not have changed the speed at which a decision would be rendered.

He said there are two factors that determine the speed of a decision. The first is when an application is deemed complete and enters the board’s queue of water-related decisions. From that point, there’s an estimated 12-month wait.

The second factor is how many other decisions are in the queue ahead of a given application.

Christle said Brandon’s application didn’t enter the board’s queue until Jan. 26 of this year because of errors and miscalculations on the part of the city that had to be fixed ahead of time.

“So the delay actually, they’re right in line with what is normal practice, but the delay that they’re experiencing is a result of an incomplete application,” Christle said during an interview with the Sun on Wednesday.

Stangherlin had said during Monday’s council meeting that the PUB reached out to the city multiple times over the winter to ask for additional information in considering the rate increases but did not mention any errors.

The PUB director said he guessed the city would get its hearing sometime in the fall, but that he could not be certain.

The Sun reached out to Stangherlin and city manager Ron Bowles on Wednesday to ask about why the errors were not mentioned at Monday’s meeting and why administration was saying withdrawing the application would speed up the process when the PUB says otherwise.

Bowles responded on behalf of city administration, but his emailed statement did not answer the Sun’s questions.

“The City of Brandon recognizes the Public Utilities Board as our utilities regulator and the experts in their processes,” the statement read.

“We have retained professional consulting expertise to guide us through their application stream and will continue to work hard to meet their requests for information. We recognize this is a large utility rate increase and understand the need for vigilance. We will also work with them to promote a public hearing should they agree with Brandon city council’s decision to have one.”

Mayor Jeff Fawcett said Wednesday that he was unaware of any errors that needed to be corrected during the application process, but he was also unsure of the specifics of that process.

“I don’t know the ins and outs of how they do their due diligence,” he said. “Maybe every time there’s a little bit of back-and-forth before applications. I don’t really know.”

While the city had originally hoped to receive an answer before July 1 this year and had budgeted for that, Fawcett said something things like this take longer.

“Even in our discussion, you can kind of hear that our understanding is that the likelihood is that it was going to be next year,” Fawcett said. “There was no point in us not doing the public hearing, it was going to be whenever they get to us anyway.”

Given the time it takes for these applications to be processed, the mayor said the next one would be submitted farther in advance.

Coun. Shawn Berry (Ward 7) asked at the council meeting why it has taken so long for the Public Utilities Board to return with an answer, saying one had originally been expected last November.

“I don’t understand why this took so long for the PUB to get back to us and then basically didn’t even have an ad out until April, which I guarantee you many people didn’t see,” he said.

In response, Stangherlin said that was difficult to answer as the city does not know how the PUB’s internal processes work.

Bowles added that the city is still waiting to get an idea of when the board will return a response, but it will work with council to engage the public when that happens.

According to both Stangherlin and Christle, only a single resident had reached out to complain about the proposed rate increase when feedback had been solicited by the board in March and April of this year.

“The one thing that does surprise me — and looking at the briefing that I received from my staff prior to talking to you — is because it appears that there are deficits within the application and they’re going to be requesting (what) I’ll call a significant change, I’m surprised that constituents aren’t more interested,” Christle said.

When Christle attended the last public hearing in Brandon for a previous rate increase, he said so many people showed up that it had to be moved from council chambers to the foyer of Brandon City Hall.

Coun. Barry Cullen (Ward 3) said during Monday’s meeting that a constituent had reached out to him to express their interest in attending a public hearing.

If residents are still interested in commenting on the increase, Stangherlin said they can still reach out to city council or the PUB, since the review is not yet complete even though the official comment period is closed.

Discussing whether to hold a hearing, Berry said when the rate application was made, the expectation was created that the public would have a chance to speak their mind on it, as was the case the public hearing on borrowing money to build new wastewater lift stations.

“We had it for a reason,” Berry said of the hearing on the borrowing. “Public engagement and listening to the public is very important, in my mind anyway, to help us make an objective decision on this.”

He said the PUB taking longer than expected shouldn’t pressure the city into skipping a hearing on a sensitive subject.

Coun. Bruce Luebke (Ward 6) said he was also opposed to withdrawing the hearing request, for the same reasons Berry cited and because there is a chance that the board denies the rate application.

Coun. Tyson Tame (Ward 10) said he had concerns about the financial implications of the delay but wasn’t willing to skip a public hearing.

The water utility’s deficit after the first quarter of 2023 was around $1.4 million, Coun. Glen Parker (Ward 9) said.

Council voted unanimously against the proposal to withdraw the hearing request, with only Coun. Kris Desjarlais (Ward 2) absent from the meeting.

Speaking to the Sun on Wednesday morning, Stangherlin said the financial impact from the delayed implementation is hard to determine without knowing when the new rates will go into effect. She guessed the fall would be the soonest that would happen.

A public hearing would take at least a month to set up and council would then have to give second and third readings to the bylaw authorizing the rate hikes should they be approved.

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