Dear Russian River County Sanitation District Ratepayer:
Sewer fees going up!
How would you react if you received a notice that your income taxes were going up 5%, even though your income is the same or less than last year and living costs are increasing rapidly? If you had the opportunity to say “no”, would you?
Any day now you will receive a notice from the Sonoma County Water Agency that your annual sewer fees are going up 5% to $987 per hookup. You may have received it already, probably on bright colored paper with four sides; one notice for each property owned in the District. YOU CAN PROTEST THIS FEE INCREASE, which makes our system the third most expensive in the County and one of the most expensive in the State.
This fee increase is being used to fund system expansion with a lot more expected in the future. While some improvements are necessary, we believe the system is being sized to serve other communities with inappropriate and inadequate review. You can expect greater increases every year as the Agency wastes your money on some questionable practices and high overhead.
What you can do.
The fee increase notice is actually a legal announcement asking if you want to protest the fee increase and announcing the fee hearing. (We believe that the hearing will be April 15th at 2:15 PM in the Board of Supervisor’s Chambers at 575 Administration Dr. in Santa Rosa.) All you have to do is sign the form, one for each separate property you own, and send it in to the Sonoma County Water Agency address listed on the form. On the reverse side it will have your name and parcel number, which they need to have. You can make a copy to keep for your records. Call (707) 565-2241 to verify meeting time and date.
What will happen?
If property owners owning half of the parcels (about 1250) sign and return their forms, the Water Agency cannot raise fees for this year. The last two years, the Agency received about 350 returned forms, but last year the fee increase was only 3% and the year before we got our letter out quite late. Some of you may feel it’s a waste of time, but we can assure you that the Agency is quite concerned that we will get enough protests this time. They stalled us badly in getting the information we needed to write this letter. Please remember to sign and mail a protest for each sewer district property you own. (You can mail more than one in an envelope to save postage.)
Please support Russian River Watershed Protection Committee.
RRWPC has been serving this community since 1980. Please join our efforts if you are not already on our list and we’ll send you updates on this and other water and wastewater issues every other month. A small donation with the donor card is all you have to send us to get on the list. Our next mailer goes out in mid-March and will have a lot more details about this situation. Please join!