Going up
Norris to raise fees on trash collection
Norris residents will see an additional $1.10 added to their monthly utility bills by January as the City Council on Monday night approved increases of 55 cents to take effect July 1 and again Jan. 1.
City Manager Adam Ledford said the higher rates are necessary to cover the city’s growing expenses to have Waste Connections operate the city’s refuse-collection service.
Ledford cited diesel-fuel prices and the Consumer Price Index, which both have increased dramatically since President Biden took office in January 2021.
The city’s contract with Waste Connections allows the private company to raise the rates it charges the city based on the increased CPI and fuel costs.
Starting July 1, residents will pay $17.55 a month, up from $17, for trash pickup. That will rise to $18.10 a month beginning next Jan. 1.
Commercial trash customers will see even higher increases, including paying more in monthly dumpster rental costs and weekly trash pickups.
Ledford also proposed to the council that the initial monthly fee to residents for the city’s new Stormwater Utility Department should be $3, which also would be included on their monthly utility bills. Those bills already include water, sewer, and trash-pickup service.
The city manager recommended an initial budget for the stormwater utility that would include a $250,000 mapping expense to determine where the city’s stormwater drain lines are, and their present condition.
All but $25,000 of that expense would be paid for by a grant, Ledford said.
One of the first major efforts of the new stormwater utility, after the mapping is completed, will be to clean out the drains and lines to improve flow of water during heavy storms.
That would help prevent stormwater runoff finding its way into the city’s sanitary sewer system, Ledford said.
Mayor Chris Mitchell said he believes that “every dollar spent [on stormwater management]” will result in “more than a dollar saved” in sewage-treatment expenses.
In its efforts to stop excess runoff of stormwater into the city’s sanitary sewer system – which has caused the city to run afoul of state environmental regulations – Norris has set up the new stormwater utility, under the city manager.
Ledford has made no recommendations yet on hiring a director to oversee the stormwater utility’s operations.
The goal is to create a better system of managing stormwater runoff than what the city now has, which includes the stormwater collection lines that run mostly along city streets.
During periods of heavy rain, stormwater infiltrates the city’s sanitary sewer system, causing an unmanageable flow to the city’s wastewater treatment plant.
There, the excess stormwater mixes with raw sewage, and because it can quickly overwhelm the treatment facility, a combination of sewage and stormwater ends up bypassing the treatment plant along East Norris Road, and is dumped into nearby Buffalo Creek.
Since early 2022, Norris has been under a “director’s order” from the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation to clean up its discharge of sewage into the creek, since the department found the city in violation of water-quality regulations concerning those discharges bypassing the sewage-treatment plant.
The city hired Cannon & Cannon Consulting Engineers of Knoxville to create the plan to remedy the violations. That plan, submitted to the council in May 2022, called for making the required repairs beginning as soon as possible, with an estimated completion date of late 2028.
Under the engineers’ plan, the price for the bulk of the work was estimated to be $5.488 million, with a potential bill as high as $6.6 million.
That does not include the possibility the city might need to install a 750,000-gallon holding tank for stormwater runoff, at an additional cost of more than $2.1 million.
Since then, the city has begun considering setting up the separate stormwater utility, which will operate independently of the city’s water and sewer department.
The stormwater management program would get its operating budget from city residents, businesses and industries.
Such a program could be efficient enough to allow the city to limit the size of the storage tank that’s being considered for the sewage plant site, intended to hold the contaminated stormwater runoff temporarily instead of allowing it to flow untreated into Buffalo Creek.
