The city of Dickinson reviews its fee schedule annually. During the City Commission’s Tuesday meeting, Deputy City Administrator Linda Carlson showed the commission the proposed changes.
“The changes to the fee schedule are mostly water rates, which comes from an increase by Southwest Water Authority … We normally add that difference onto the customer’s fees to help pay for our infrastructure … to make sure that we can replace our (water) mains,” Carlson said.
This year, the proposed change is a $0.32 increase per 1,000 gallons of water.
Other proposed rate increases are to the solid waste commercial collection rates. Under this section, the fees for collection once a week through five times per week would increase 7% and the fees once and twice per month would increase 7%.
Solid Waste Manager Aaron Praus said that the 7% increases were needed to balance that part of the budget.
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Additional proposed fee increases include the fee for birthday parties at the Dickinson Museum Center— from $75 to $100 — and the fee for the fire plan review — from $40 to $100.
Only one fee is proposed to decrease — the fire suppression system plan review, from $350 to $300.
The city is expected to remove two fees due to nonuse — the $3.50 interlibrary loan and the commercial solid waste collection rates for all yards collected six times a week, which ended because the service itself ended.
“We only had a handful of accounts that actually were going six times a week, and it wasn’t justifiable to have an operator come in for that amount of time,” Praus said.
Carlson said the removals are part of a process to clean up the lengthy fee schedule.
“Since I’ve been here, they’ve just been staying on, even if they don’t use them,” she said. “We’ve been trying to clean it up because … the fee schedule gets longer and longer … If you haven’t used them in the last three years, evidently we’re not going to use them; there’s no reason to be on there. Our code doesn’t say that you have to charge for it.”
The city commissioners tabled their review of the fee schedule in favor of a work session, which will take place Dec. 3 at 2:30 pm in a public meeting at City Hall, after which the commission will vote on the schedule.
