Laramie council debates caps and tiers for stormwater utility; staff asked to return with multifamily and high‑bill data

The Laramie City Council spent the bulk of its Oct. 14 work session reviewing proposed revisions to the surface‑water utility rate structure, including caps for high nonresidential bills, possible residential tiers and tradeoffs between capital investment and maintenance.

Consultant Aaron Murray of WSP and city staff presented billing distributions and modeled scenarios. They showed that single‑family residential caps (examples tested: $30 and $50 per month) would reduce annual revenue by less than 1 percent, while nonresidential caps have much larger effects because a small number of large parcels account for substantial revenue at the high end of the billing distribution. "You can see the impact is less than 1% for either of those caps $50 or $30 — not a big impact to revenue," Murray told council regarding single‑family caps.

The presentation used examples to show the range of revenue impacts from nonresidential caps. In one example a $170 monthly cap would reduce revenue from the highest‑billed parcel group from about $1.5 million to roughly $375,000, a reduction that lowered total modeled annual…