Date: Fri 06-Mar-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

edink-sewer-assessments

Full Text:

Ed Ink: Paying For Sewers

Later this month, residents, businesses, and churches in Newtown's sewer

districts should get their first sewer bills. The assessments on 641

residential properties and 126 non-residential properties will generate

approximately $15.9 million -- about half of the overall $32.5 million cost of

the sewer system. (A listing of all the sewer assessments appears on pages

C9-10 this week.) Most of the rest of the sewer system costs is covered by

state and federal grants and local property tax revenues.

The town's Water Pollution Control Authority, which has overseen the

construction of the system and is charged with its administration, has come up

with a remarkably fair assessment formula, which charges the bulk of the sewer

users -- individual residences -- $9,900. Apparently that formula sits well

with most people. Informal appeals of individual assessments were filed by

only a little more than one percent of the property owners in the sewer

district, and about half of that number received reductions in their

assessments as a result.

The most controversial of the appeals came from the five churches in the sewer

district, which had faced assessments ranging from $34,380 for the tiny St

John's Episcopal Church in Sandy Hook to $227,430 for St Rose of Lima. The

churches argued that they should not be assessed at the standard

non-residential rate, like most business and commercial properties, because

they held a special status in town, providing social and spiritual benefits to

the community. They are tax exempt, they pointed out, and sewer assessments

are a kind of tax. They lobbied for the $9,900 resdential rate.

In the end, the WPCA, in Solomonic fashion, did reduce the assessments for the

churches, by more than half in some cases and by more than a fair measure in

all cases. Sewer assessments, after all, are not taxes, they are utility

charges. As far as we know, the churches aren't getting any breaks in their

electric and phone bills; they have no cause to expect to be absolved from

paying a rate commensurate with their use of this particular utility simply

because it is town-owned.