Auburn residents should prepare to pay more on their utility bills starting Feb. 1.

Auburn City Council members on Jan. 19 passed an ordinance increasing the monthly rates for water, storm and sewer utilities.

Among the three utilities, the average single-family household will be paying $3.48 per month total more in 2010 than it did in 2010. The increases are based on the results of a study city staff conducted with the help of the Redmond-based FCS group, which specializes in municipal and investor-owned utility rate studies. The study analyzed cash flow, capital improvement plans, interest rates, inflation and present and future debt for each utility and found that the annual rate increases were needed in each utility to meet planned expenses.

The planning period for the study was 2009-2014, and annual rate increases become effective each Jan. 1 for each year in that span.

Auburn City Council member Sue Singer, a member of the Public Works Committee, said the City has been delaying a number of projects in the water department, but it has come to the place where it can’t delay them any more.

“The system’s old, we have to start catching up a little bit on the maintenance,” Singer said.

The City also has updated its six-year plan for utilities and it needs to be able to fund that, too, Singer said, adding that the City did put off some projects in the plan but couldn’t delay them all.

One factor that added a small amount to the rate increase is that the City is starting depreciation of the system, meaning it will now include maintenance of the system in the rates.

“We’re doing that so we don’t have rate increases when they are undesirable, like we are having to do now,” Singer said. “We are doing that so that we won’t have future councils having to make these tough decisions when people feel they can least afford it.”

City Councilman Rich Wagner, chairman of the Public Works Committee, said everybody worked hard to keep the rate increases as low as possible.

“The engineers came to us with better data than we have ever seen before on the age of our system, and the costs we are paying to repair the system on an emergency basis,” Wagner said. “We spent probably three months scrubbing the engineers’ suggestions for improvements to the aging system and took out about half of the projects that they had proposed. In other words, they came forward to start with rate increase needs that would have been about double what we ended up with.

“I really appreciate the work of the engineers and our committee in Public Works in deciding which were the projects we really, really, really had to do right now,” Wagner continued. “That process is probably invisible to the average citizen, but it isn’t like we just took the engineers’ suggestions and said OK. We essentially dropped the rates by half of what they were suggesting, even though they are higher than any of us wanted. We had hoped to drop them by another 50 percent, but there is enough data to support the aging system’s potential problems, so we had to go ahead with that.”

Wagner noted that increases to the storm water utilities rate can be traced in part to the large number of unfunded mandates the state and federal governments have imposed on the City under the Clean Water Act and the National Pollution Discharge Elimination System (NPDES).

“We knew the mandates were coming, but we didn’t know what would be required of the City until this year,” Wagner said. “It’s a laudable Act, but given the 3-inch-thick manual, there’s a lot of stuff that needs to be done.”