Tacoma staff propose phased increase to water system development charge; council filing recommended

Tacoma Water asked the Government Performance and Finance Committee on Nov. 4 to forward proposed revisions to the city's System Development Charge (SDC) rules for first consideration by the City Council. Presenters said the updated SDCs reflect capital investments in the utility and new usage data from the utility's advanced metering infrastructure (AMI).

The study authors described the SDC as a one-time charge, due when a new meter is purchased, intended to recover the capital costs required to serve new connections rather than shift those costs to existing ratepayers. "This is the charge that we assess for a new connection to our water system," said Andrew Snoroff, the financial subject-matter expert presenting the study. Staff said the methodology buckets allocable capital assets into functions that serve average-day demand, peak-day capacity and fire flow and then divides dollars by the appropriate denominators for each customer class using AMI-derived usage and capacity metrics.

The…