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Politics & Government

City Charged All Imperial Beach Property Owners Too Much or Too Little - Here's Why

After taking over sewer fee calculations for the first time, city officials made several mistakes. Every bill sent to property owners was incorrect.

City officials are advising Imperial Beach residents not to pay property taxes until they receive a new bill. City staff miscalculated sewer fees, which is paid through property taxes.

The inaccurate August 2011 charges were first reported by the city in mid-October to be limited to single family home owners, but further examination found that due to multiple mistakes, bills sent to all Imperial Beach property owners were incorrect.

“Essentially, 100 percent of bills sent were miscalculated,” said Public Works Department director Hank Levein. “Some were only off by pennies, others were off by much more than that. Maybe hundreds of dollars.”

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A new bill is on its way, he said. How long delivery takes will vary.

Corrected numbers were sent to the county assessors office on Oct. 27.

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Levein estimates those who were over billed will receive a new bill from the county any day now, if they haven’t already. Under billed residents will receive a corrected bill from the city in several weeks.   

For more than a decade, the city contracted sewer fee calculation duties to an outside company. Tight budgets and city employees who believed they could take over the job.

But when property owners began receiving their tax bills, they noticed something was off. 

“The problem was first recognized after several property owners called in about abnormal bill amounts,” Levein said.

Mistake 1: The Shift           

Sewer bills are calculated, in part, by utilizing Microsoft Excel sheets, Levein said. So when a column was offset by one line, problems ensued.

“Many single-family property owners were billed based on the adjacent owners water usage,” he said.

The first mistake seems pretty self-explanatory. Subsequent mistakes are not quite as simple. Here’s some sewer fee foundational info that will help make sense of the rest.

The Basics

Sewer fees are based on last year’s water usage. If the numbers show that water was used for less than a year, the bill must be normalized for a 12-month period. For example, if last year a property owner rented a space for only six months, the next year’s bill will normalize that time for a year of water usage.

Once this number is calculated, it is multiplied by a base rate. Base rates vary depending on what kind of property you own.

Mistake 2: Water Usage Galore

This one applied to single-family and multi-family units who host multiple renters a year. Instead of water usage being added together to get one picture of water consumption, each individual renter was treated as a new and different address. Every renter was normalized to cover a 12-month period.

So say there were three renters.

“Since these were all renters of the same parcel, each of the normalized bills were added together creating a parcel bill approximately three times greater than the actual cost,” explained Levein.

Mistake 3: Does This Base Rate Make Me Look Fat?

Similar to the last error, residences that had multiple renters got charged the base rate for each renter. Sewer bills are charged a base fee plus a water consumption charge. 

Instead of being charged one base rate per parcel, “when there were multiple renters at an address, a base rate fee was added to the bill for each renter,” Levein said.

Only single-family units felt the brunt of this error.

Mistake 4: Restaurant Doesn’t Equal Industrial Complex

In layman terms, commercial units were mislabeled.

Here’s the not-layman explanation.

“All waste water discharges are assigned to a ‘class’ with each class having a unique per unit fee depending on the treatment cost for that type of discharge,” Levein said.

Being different classes, restaurant parcels don’t have the same costs associated to an industrial complex parcel. This makes mislabeling a problem.

That’s the breakdown.

Despite the assortment of problems, the city still intends to do property tax calculations in house next year.

“We have learned from this and hopefully are wise enough not to repeat it,” Levein said. 

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