1991-03-25 Regular Meeting - Laserfiche WebLink

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CITY OF LA PORTE INTER-OFFICE MEMORANDUM T0: Robert T. Herrera, City Manager FROM: Jeff Litchfield, Director of Fina Date: March 18, 1991 SUBJECT: Request by Councilman Skelton At the March 11, 1991 City Council Meeting, I presented Council with an Ordinance that would change our method of calculating sewer for residential customers. As explained to you earlier, I believe the current method will increase costs to our current customer base because of the upwards shift in the "winter average". At the March 11, 1991 meeting, Councilman Skelton stated that he wanted me to provide him with examples of the impact on the citizens that are over 65 years of age. The examples that I had prepared related to water customers as a whole and did not specifically relate to one segment of users. I did not have any examples prepared for over 65 customers. Councilman Skelton tabled the ordinance until I could provide examples of the impact on senior citizens. Councilman Skelton's request is not an easy one to respond to. I have no way of knowing the age of our water customers from our utility system. Because of this, I had to go outside of the utility system to define my population. The best thing I could think of was the tax system. I extracted all records from the tax system that had the over 65 exemption. I found that there were 729 accounts that had the exemption. From this population, I extracted a sample of 73 or 10$ of the population. The sample was determined by using Lotus software to pick 73 random numbers between one and 729. For the 73 items that were selected, I calculated the following numbers: 1. What they paid last year, (referred to as old rate), 2. What they will be paying, once we update the bills, if we remain under the current system, (referred to as the new rate), and 3. What they would have paid last year if the proposed system had been in place, (referred to as the proposed rate).