Sewer availability charges — those are fightin’ words in Minneapolis. And the fight is with the Metropolitan Council.
Our friends at the Metropolitan Council Environmental Services collect and treat wastewater in seven regional treatment plants. They are also charged with being sure there is sufficient sewer capacity to serve planned development.
To pay for each new connection or expansion of capacity, our friends charge a fee known as the sewer availability charge. This is called a one-time fee, but if you pay this fee in one location and decide to move to another, you get to pay again.
“This is very clearly an anti-small business policy,” said Council Member Kevin Reich at a Thursday session.
“These are big issues for our small businesses,” added Council Member Meg Tuthill. “It’s crazy.”
“The time for us to be silent is no longer,” said Council Member Lisa Goodman, who went on to accuse her colleagues at the Metropolitan Council of “putting their heads in the sand.”
Minneapolis paid 17.5 percent of all the sewer availability charges collected by the Metropolitan Council in 2011 but did not expand overall capacity. In fact, Minneapolis has been decreasing share of the capacity every year for the last seven years.
It is not cheap. Target Field paid $969,825 in sewer availability charges but did not require changes in capacity. Or new pipes.
But you’ve never gotten a bill from your friends at Metropolitan Council. No one in Minneapolis gets a bill from the Metropolitan Council, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t paid.
The Metropolitan Council doesn’t actually bill the public for this fee. The City of Minneapolis does and then passes along the payments.
“People think we’re the bad guys,” said Tuthill.
Council Member Sandy Colvin Roy knows how to get even with the likes of the Metropolitan Council. She thinks the council should be sending out the bills under its name so there would be no mistake about who is asking whom for money.
That change would require action by the Legislature, but the City Council is willing to do just that.
Jerry Bell to chair Target Center group
The guy who helped get Target Field built and labored long and hard in the Minnesota Twins front office has agreed to chair the city’s Target Center Implementation Committee, the unit that will oversee the center’s $135 million remodeling project. Bell and a roster of city officials and community leaders were approved Thursday by the Minneapolis City Council.
Elected city officials on the committee include Mayor R.T. Rybak, Council President Barb Johnson and Council Members Elizabeth Glidden, Lisa Goodman, John Quincy, Don Samuels and Meg Tuthill.
Appointed community leaders include Tim Baylor, Kevin Dooley, Kelly Doran, Devean George, Archie Givens, Joanne Kaufman, Fred Krohn, Dan McConnell, Karen Rosar and Brian Woolsey.
Jeremy Hanson Willis, director of Minneapolis Community Planning and Community Development, has been designated lead city staff assigned to the project.