Willow Glen Resident

News

SJ officials to alert all residents of sewer fee increases

By Eli Segall

San Jose residents should receive notices next month alerting them of possible sewer and storm fee increases set to go in front of the San Jose City Council this June.

The city council on April 17 approved sending letters to all San Jose residents outlining the possible 9 percent sewer and storm fee increase to single-family homes and 3 percent to 15 percent hikes to commercial businesses. The notice should arrive by May 4, according to a recent memo from John Stufflebean, director of the city's environmental services department. The letter will also say that more fee hikes are projected for the following two years, though no specific percentages have been determined.

A public hearing is scheduled for June 19 to allow residents to protest the hikes, which the council will vote on by the end of June. If approved, single-family residences would pay $54.36 for annual storm sewer charges, a $4.44 increase from the current $49.92. Non-storm sewer service and use charges would jump $1.94 per month, from $21.63 to $23.57.

The increases are needed to maintain San Jose's aging sewer infrastructure, city officials say. Approximately 80 percent of the city's 2,200 miles of sewer pipes were installed between 1950 and 1979, and older pipes can sag, crack, separate at joints and clog, according to a memo last month from Stufflebean. Several maintenance projects have been deferred over the years due to insufficient funding, he added.

The new rates, however, would bring the city an additional $5.5 million for sanitary sewers and $1.4 million for sewers connected to storm drains, said Kate Drayson of the environmental services department.

Sewer backups are nothing new to older neighborhoods such as Willow Glen, the Rose Garden and downtown, where a combination of old pipes and sinking ground levels from decades of groundwater pumping have strained the sewer lines, said Raymond Ho, manager of the transportation department's sewer and storm services division.

Catherine Read, who moved from the Rose Garden to Willow Glen three years ago, knows this from personal experience.

"When we lived in the Rose Garden, there were backups all the time," Read said. Once or twice a year, street pipes would clog and spill out into her home, leaving an unpleasant smell and a significant mess to clean, she said. This problem has not occurred since she moved to Willow Glen, she noted.

However, other problems are visible from her front porch on Cherry Avenue. The roadway is cracked down the middle from Britton Avenue to Willow Street, and one longtime resident attributed the problem to a sinking sewer line.

In addition to pipe maintenance, another beneficiary of the new rates would be the San Jose/Santa Clara Water Pollution Control Plant on Zanker Road, which serves San Jose and several surrounding cities and needs approximately $1 billion worth of repairs. The 50-year-old plant handles 120 million gallons of sewage per day, enough to fill the HP Pavilion Arena, Drayson noted.

Problems at the plant include a failing electrical system, deteriorating pipes that feed into and out of the plant, and seismic vulnerabilities.

"We've now reached the point where we've very concerned about it," Drayson said.