Consultant: Master meters cut Highland Park wholesale bills by about $967,000; council presses for CSO reallocation

At a workshop presentation, Mark, a consultant with Utility Financial Solutions (UFS), told Highland Park council members that installation of master wholesale water and sewer meters produced nearly $1 million in annual wholesale savings and that a planned regional review of combined-sewer-overflow (CSO) allocations could yield substantially larger relief.

UFS updated the city's five-year financial projection for water, wastewater and stormwater services and recommended no rate increase this year, primarily because the newly captured meter data reduced the city's wholesale charges. "Because of the installation of the wholesale meters, our charges from the wholesaler are actually going to decrease to about $5.4 million — a savings of roughly $967,000 a year," Mark said during the presentation.

The nut of the matter, he said, is CSO allocation. "The allocation established in the late 1990s was never updated," Mark said. Based on recently accepted meter data, UFS estimates Highland Park's allocated CSO share may be closer to 4% rather than the roughly 2.065% currently assigned. Using those figures, Mark said Highland Park's 2027 wholesale CSO-related charges projected at about $1.8 million could instead be roughly $1.5…