(2/24) The discussion on how the Town wants to change water and sewer tap rates continued into February’s Town council meeting. The discussion began last fall when Christ Community Church asked for an exemption on their tap fees for their main church to be constructed on Creamery Road. The request sparked the Council to begin reviewing water connection fees for all businesses in town and not just for nonprofits and churches before making any decisions on whether or not to raise the connection fees.

Currently Emmitsburg charges $8,200 for a water connection tap and $8,000 for a sewer connection tap. Builders of new homes are charge one water and one sewer no mate how many bathrooms or sinks the home will have. However, for non-residential structures, the number of taps are calculated based upon the number of fixtures, e.g., sinks, toilets, water fountains that the facility will have.

When a building is in the planning phase, Frederick County dictates that certain fixtures must be included when it's constructed in order to pass code inspections. Based on the number of fixtures required, the town calculates the connection fees by taking the total number of fixtures in the building and dividing it by 15 to determine the number of taps that will be charged.

Unlike Emmitsburg, Frederick County, in calculating the total number of taps, allows for a modification of the fixture number depending on the type of non-residential building to acknowledge that not all fixtures that are required by code would be necessarily used, which could decrease the cost of the total fees accordingly.

Emmitsburg is the only municipality in Frederick County that uses a fixture chart to calculate tap costs versus basing costs off of usage of a standard 250 gallons of use per day. For comparison of the two methods, Christ Community Church was quoted $164,000 based on the town’s current fixture chart and $38,000 based up proposed usage calculations.

Commissioner Valerie Turnquist felt the fees on non-residential properties should be changed. "Our rates are so much higher than other municipalities because we adopted the Frederick County’s fixture approach, but we didn’t adopt the ‘capacity adjustment factor’." She asked how the Town could be expected to attract businesses with such high connection fees.

The capacity adjustment factor allows the Council to reevaluate the business or non-profits usage after a year to see if the initial fees were accurate. "One of the things you have to write into it [capacity adjustment language] is where you re-evaluate a year worth of usage to make sure the tap fee that was calculated was reasonable," said Willets. Commissioner Jim Hoover pointed out that Taneytown used to hold off on collecting the tap fee until a year after the business was connected to ensure they didn’t over or under charge them.

Commissioner Amy Pollitt said asked for Town Staff to collect further information about what other municipalities of a comparable size to Emmitsburg are doing.

Since the Council favored the addition of the Capacity Adjustment factor, Willets proposed creating a draft Ordinance for the Council’s review and edit. Prior to adoption, the town will need to hold a public hearing to gather public input.