Williams eyes service fee adjustments

Williams officials say money is too short to be subsidizing services.

City Manager Chuck Bergson plans to meet with the city’s financial consultant next week to begin preparing a comprehensive fee and rate study to determine what the city should be charging for certain services.

Bergson said the city has not adjusted its fees for several years, and most are far lower than those charged in comparable cities.

“The city has been subsidizing costs and losing revenue as a result,” Bergson said.

The City Council last week authorized Bergson to contract with Bartle Wells Associates, a Berkeley company, to do the study.

The study will help the city determine if its user and impact fees are adequately offsetting the city’s actual cost for performing certain services, Bergson said.

“That is what the law allows,” he added.

Bergson said the company will look at the two kinds of fees charged by the city, including user fees – such as building permits and facility rentals – and impact fees, such as one-time charges to developers to offset the city’s cost of providing police, fire and other services.

Impact fees include also improvements on developments for such things as street lighting and parkland.

Only the city’s water and sewer fees have been recently updated to reflect the actual cost of providing services or of mitigating development impacts, Bergson said.

The city also approved a new fee structure for special events.

Once the new rate study is completed, the city hopes to simplify its fee structure – making it easier to understand – and to ensure that all fees charged are fair, reasonable and comparable to those in similar cities, Bergson said.

The Colusa City Council approved its new fee structure earlier this year.

Like Colusa, the Williams City Council will have to decide what fees the city may wish to subsidize and what needs to be charged at cost.

Bergson said the most fees “out of whack” were those related to building and planning, such as plan checks and reviews.

The cost to do the study is $29,300, and will be paid from the general fund.

Although it was not a budgeted item, the cost was consider by the council to be a long-range, one-time expenditure that merited the appropriation of city reserves, Bergson said.

Bartle Wells Associates was the lowest of five responsible bids, which ranged from $25,000 to $63,000.

The lowest bid, from a Temecula company, was incomplete, Bergson said.