Curtiss looking to raise sewer rates in 2025
By Kevin O’Brien
Curtiss residents can expect to pay more for sewer services starting next year, as village board members prepare to pay back debt for ongoing wastewater upgrades.
At an Oct. 2 meeting, DPW Larry Swarr presented the board with a trio of options for increasing sewer rates in order to cover the longterm borrowing costs for phosphorus treatment and dewatering upgrades at the sewer plant.
Though the board did not officially approve new rates for next year, trustees expressed a preference for the option that would have the least amount of impact on quarterly utility bills.
“Well, I really don’t want to raise the sewer rates up too much for people,” said village president Betty Rettig. “I’ve heard a lot from people already, so let’s try to keep them down.”
Under the board’s preferred option, households with a ¾ inch water meter would pay $103 per quarter as a base charge, plus $4.03 for thousand gallons of water used. The current base rate is $71.50 per quarter and the flow rate is $4.13 per thousand.
The option preferred by the board assumes that the village will only be borrowing enough money from the Wisconsin DNR’s Clean Water Fund to pay the bills from Switlick & Sons, the contractor building the new sewer facilities. The bills coming from the project engineers, CBS Squared, would be paid for out of the village’s utility fund, which would reduce the amount of money the village has to borrow and pay back with interest. Swarr said the utility fund currently has about $147,000 in it, which is more than enough to pay the anticipated engineering bills for the sewer project.
With just the construction bills being paid for by the CWF, Swarr said the village should expect to borrow just under $1.5 million to complete the entire project.
The village is currently including a 5 percent contingency in the project budget plus 5 percent for engineering services. So far, Swarr said the village has spent around $10,000 out of the $90,000 in budgeted contingency funds.
“We aren’t using it really fast,” he said. “That isn’t to say that, when we get into the building itself, we wouldn’t use more. I don’t know. I’m kind of thinking we’re going to come in quite a bit under that budget.”
CBS Squared, however, has provided its own budget estimates with a much higher contingency rate, which would require the village to borrow an additional $500,000, Swarr said. If the village went along with this scenario, the quarterly base charge would increase to $105 and the volume charge would be $4.03.
Swarr said he initially thought the village would need to enact the new rates for the final quarter of this year, but he and the board agreed that it could wait to have them take effect on Jan. 1, 2025.
“It would be nice to kick it down the road another quarter,” he said.
The board did not take any action, but Swarr said he would get input from Abbyland Foods about the proposed rates for a future board discussion.
Fire assessment drops
Treasurer Jane Stoiber told the board that the Owen-Withee-Curtiss Fire District recently approved a 1.2 percent increase in its budget for 2025, which includes $3-perhour raises for firefighters, bringing their wages up to $18 per hour.
The village’s equalized property value dropped by $13.8 million due to the state exempting all personal property from assessments, she said, which led to a corresponding decrease in Curtiss’s fire fee, down to $19,714 for next year. With the district now paying $20,000 annually to rent the village’s fire hall under a three-year contract, it’s essentially a wash for the village.
“In essence, the village of Curtiss is not contributing anything to the fire district next year to run it,” she said.
However, Stoiber also said the fire district instituted a new annual fee to help cover the cost of on-call pay for EMTs to make sure enough of them are available around the clock. Starting next year, each of the eight municipalities in the district will be charged $4,212, which puts the village’s total cost for both firefighting and ambulance services at $23,926, she said.
NEW TRUSTEE - Carl Swarr was sworn in as a new village trustee by village clerk Carole Devine at a meeting last Wednesday.
STAFF PHOTO/KEVIN O’BRIEN
