CONYERS — The Water and Sewerage Authority voted to ask the Rockdale Board of Commissioners to increase the rates for processing septic waste after citing a yearly average of $600,000 that the county loses because its rates are less than neighboring counties’.

The rate increase was presented to the BOC last month, followed by some concern from septic haulers that included whether they would be charged by the truck size or by the gallon.

The authority proposes to bump the charge for haulers from $100 per truck, regardless of size, to $125 per 1,000 gallons of septage to keep from losing money and to restore the capacity at the Quigg Wastewater Treatment plant that the county needs.

“We want to be able to take care of our customers’ septage, not anybody else’s,” said authority Chairman Elaine Nash during the authority’s Thursday meeting.

Rockdale Water Resources Director Dwight Wicks presented the haulers’ concerns and provided a cost breakdown to explain the recommended rate increase. Wicks went over the cost for processing the septage at the plant and detailed the mark-up costs for billing, including overhead, maintenance and capital improvements.

“If anyone is going to argue with these numbers, I think they got a tough argument,” said authority member Chip Hatcher.

Hatcher specifically pointed to the wear and tear the process puts on the equipment.
“These things aren’t made out of kryptonite,” Hatcher said.

“I’ll be honest with you, I think it’s fortunate that we’re able to keep it down to $125 because there was a great deal of discussion about it being more than that,” said authority member Garvin Haynes.

Haynes, along with Nash, went on a site visit to a couple of neighboring treatment plants to see how they deal with processing outside haulers. Haynes reported Gwinnett and DeKalb counties saw a significant decrease in haulers, down to as few as two a month, when they increased their rates.

Rockdale County accepted almost 300 trucks last month, according to Haynes, who wanted to see how this rate increase would help bring down that number.

“If it doesn’t change the number of haulers, as far as I’m concerned we may have to go up,” Haynes said.

The BOC is expected to take action on the rate increase proposal next week, according to the agenda for a called meeting Tuesday.

In other business, Wicks informed the authority that RWR has caught up its water billing. After RWR made the switch to the Cogsdale software in December, the water department was unable to send bills to some customers because certain files from the old system did not transfer over. They caught up with the billing and started receiving two bills a month in certain months.

“Beginning with the month of May, we should be back on the billing cycle,” Wicks said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: June 8, 2010

The article should have reported the Water and Sewerage Authority sought to increase septic charges from the current rate of $100 per truck load to $125 per 1,000 gallons. The Citizen regrets the error.