McHenry Times

At the Dec. 19 meeting of the McHenry city council, council heard about and discussed the future water and sewer plan for the community.

Public Works director Troy Strange presented the Water and Sewer Fund Community Investment Plan that will run from 2023 until 2032. In the previous year, the city did a study on its usage and water-sewer assets and costs to create new base fees that will provide balanced and appropriate income to manage the city’s finances. This was done on a ten-year projection and will have annual updates.

“We did the research in-house, and what we essentially did was we quantified all the city's water sewer funded assets,” Strange told council. “So everything from vehicles, equipment, facilities, you know, wells, plants, water towers, lift stations, every replaceable piece of capital that we had, we defined what its expected service life was and its replacement cost. We annualize those costs, sum them all together. We wanted to quantify how much essentially equity we need to be putting back in our system, how much money we need to be putting back into our system just to replace what was depreciating out of it on an annual basis. If you recall last year, when we do do audits of that fund, it wasn't a perfect match, but we did find that the number that we came up with matched within a relative order of magnitude to what we quantified through a separate audit of what our depreciation costs are. So once we had this annual number, we set our capital-based fees based upon this projection.”

Council was told this project was long overdue as the city’s rates were on a very simple and unsupportive basis of covering the usage fees and the minimum debt service payments for water and sewer infrastructure. The fund for water-sewer actually bottomed out around 2019, and would be in the negatives by now if things hadn’t been restructured. The new fees are flat rate for the ten-year projection, so they will lose purchasing power for the city as inflation hits, but staff is ready to compromise and figure things out as they go.

The department has planned and funded all capital improvement projects for the 2022-2023 fiscal year, which includes annual and routine maintenance, some equipment purchases, and work on a particular well. They have also outlined proposed capital improvements for the 2023-2024 fiscal year as well. 

Council was told the department is attempting to continue the bare necessities for all capital improvements.

The council uploaded a livestream of its meeting to the city’s YouTube channel.

The council will meet again at 7 p.m. on Jan. 16 at 333 South Green St.