Cape sewer fees set to skyrocket

An attempt to keep raw sewage from flowing into Casco Bay could bump rates more than 20 percent through four years.

CAPE ELIZABETH — According to legend, Cape Elizabeth split in two in the late 19^th century in a battle over sewer systems. The populous part of town wanted to hook into the Portland Water District, while the rural, southern part was content with dug wells and individual septic tanks.

Residents of what eventually became South Portland had meant to annex themselves to Portland, but that never happened. Meanwhile, those who refused to modernize got to keep the Cape Elizabeth name, and escape sewage fees.

Flash forward 120 years. Today, Cape Elizabeth has a sewer system of its own, part of which is tied into the South Portland treatment plant, some of which is owned by the Portland Water District.
What Cape also has is a sewage problem that will cost $2.56 million to fix through five years, driving user rates up 20.2 percent in a four-step process that includes a 4.5 percent rate increase in March, followed by hikes of 5.7 percent, 5.4 percent and 3.8 percent, respectively, each year thereafter.

Town Manager Michael McGovern has asked town councilors to hike the minimum monthly fee for 100 cubic feet of water use from $37.70 to $48 by March 2015. Meanwhile, the usage fee for each additional 100 cubic feet used is slated to climb from $4.95 to $5.57 in the same time frame.

“The reason I put the heavier burden the minimum [fee] is because it’s more predictable revenue – it’s less variable that the fee based on usage – and we need predictable revenue,” said McGovern. “And, overall, usage is trending down at the water district.”

According to McGovern, 2,200 of the 4,000 homes in Cape Elizabeth are hooked to the sewer system.

“There are many different ways you can manipulate the numbers to come out with the same bottom-line result, but these changes seem to make sense to me,” said Councilor James Walsh. “It amounts to $2 or $3 per month, per year.”

According to Chris Dwinal of Wright-Pierce Environmental Engineering, Cape’s sewer problem is what’s known as a “combined sewer overflow” (CSO). That’s a system that carries both raw sewage from homes and stormwater runoff from the streets. Since the 1970s, Cape Elizabeth has had a CSO that has dumped sewage into Danforth Cove whenever rains are sufficient to overwhelm the Ottawa Road pump station.

That overflow amounted to 5 million gallons in 2006. Through September of this year, 1 million gallons of sewage – albeit diluted with rainwater – has flushed into the bay.

“None of that got to the treatment plant; all of that went into Danforth Cove,” said McGovern, at a Jan. 11 council workshop. According to Dwinal, the discharge pipe is exposed at low tide.

Although the CSO has dumped overflow into Danforth Cove for decades, the Department of Environmental Protection only began to license the practice in 2009, with an eye to eventual elimination. However, Dwinal said, doing that would jump the projected cost by as much as 100 percent.

Instead, the recommendation he’s made, following a 22-month study of Cape’s sewer systems, will divert stormwater runoff from the sewer pipes, reducing flow by 1,100 gallons per minute. That, says Dwinal, is enough to cut all overflow from any storm that dumps 2.5 inches of rain in a 24-hour period. It also would have cut the volume sewage that overflowed into Danforth Cove in the past five years by 94 percent, he said.

According to McGovern, up to $700,000 of the project cost will come from money now in the town’s sewer user fund. As much as $2 million would be raised through a 15-year bond that would be issued in 2014, at about $150,000 in annual interest, at current rates.

The proposed sewer fee increase comes on the back of similar 4 percent jumps each year since 2009, assessed to pay for upgrades to the Spurwink Avenue treatment plant that serves the southern part of Cape Elizabeth.