November 4, 2009

Today at the meeting we talked about a subject that is one of those unfunded mandates that the federal government passes to the state and then it is passed to the county and finally to the city. The definition of a unfunded mandate is some government entity thinks up some great idea and gets some legislative body to pass it but they fail to find any funding and they say let the lower level pay for it. That is what local governments have to deal with.

Today’s unfunded mandate is about FOG (Fats, Oils and Grease), which involves our sewer system, and is something we passed in July, and it appears we need to revisit the issue and fine tune our ordinance. As it stands now, we have about 141 commercial sewer accounts and about 33 of those actually deal with FOG, that would be mostly restaurants, and all 141 are charge and extra $15 a month to cover the $75,000 it costs the city to inspect and file paperwork to the EPA that we have clean sewer lines, but we only collect about$25,000 in fees now. That is a $50,000 difference that has to be paid by someone – that would be the sewer users of Flowery Branch. Don’t you just love unfunded mandates?

We have to figure out something because we need to have the FOG ordinance so we can get permits for our sewer plant expansions in the future and at the same time keep our sewer rates at a level to continue to attract residents and small businesses. Read about it here and here.