McHenry considers hiking base fees for water, sewer service on top of planned rate increase

McHenry officials are thinking about raising base fees paid by city water and sewer users to pay for millions of dollars worth of capital improvements they said could be needed within the next one to two decades, including the construction of a fifth water processing plant.

City staff analyzed hiking bimonthly base fees on McHenry’s utility users by between $1.50 and $14.85 bimonthly, and the McHenry City Council will consider what step to take at an upcoming meeting.

Such increases would push the city’s capital improvement budget for its water and sewer networks from the current $390,000 annual spending capacity on upgrades like pipe lining, pipe rehabilitation and water main replacements for the utility network, to between $500,000 at the $1.50-increase mark and nearly $1.4 million a year at the high end.

The city staff is recommending a bimonthly base fee increase of no less than $6.40.

But 1st Ward Alderman Vic Santi said he would be comfortable moving forward with looking at a base fee increase within the range of $4.75 and $6.40, while 3rd Ward Alderman Frank McClatchey said he would be “really hard-pressed” to support any fee increases on water and sewer users.

4th Ward Alderman Ryan Harding said he was leaning toward supporting the $6.40 base fee increase.

The city this year also increased its rates for the per-gallon use of water and sewer utilities. Water rates went up 8%, and wastewater rates went up 5%.

Any base fee increase between the range of $1.50 and $14.85 likely would come on top of another debt service fee or other funding the city would be looking to use to finance $3 million worth of planned work to relocate utilities along Route 31 to accommodate its reconstruction between Bull Valley Road and Elm Street planned by the Illinois Department of Transportation to start in 2024, city officials said.

“Our intention is not to force any of your hands as far as raising rates or base fees, but rather to have an honest conversation about how we want to function. The truth is we can keep the base fees exactly the same and function just fine,” McHenry Public Works Director Troy Strange said.

Bimonthly municipal water rate comparisons

But the city’s growth and the council’s appetite for risk will determine whether a fifth water processing plant needs to be ready for construction around 2040.

McHenry’s current filtered water use is about 2.1 million gallons a day on average, with a 2.8 million gallon maximum day demand in 2020, city staff said.

The standard system design for daily water supply is that the maximum daily demand can be met with the largest well out of service, city officials said.

The city meets that standard if unfiltered water is used but would not meet the standard with only filtered water right now, meaning in the case of a well failure during a high demand month, McHenry would have to run unfiltered water with high iron content until the failure is repaired.

“If this risk is acceptable, then no action is needed at this time; if this risk is unacceptable, then the city needs to begin design for a fifth water plant in the near future,” city staffers wrote in a presentation.

The staff recommended the construction of a fifth water plant when the maximum daily usage exceeds the filtered water capacity of the existing water plants based upon 18-hour run times, which could occur by 2040 based on staff projections with assumptions that McHenry will add 100 households per year on average, each of the city’s homes has 2½ persons on average and each person uses 90 gallons a day on average.

“We can operate at a little bit higher level of risk because we’re not being proactive,” Strange said. “But we can operate cheaper. It will be a bit cheaper but come at higher risk. If some sort of critical failure happens, then we would lose control over the process because it would be happening in real time.”

Council members and city staff are going to discuss whether to move forward with any utility base fee increases and, if so, how large of raises at a future meeting this year, officials said.