Meeting of March 22, 2022

good afternoon welcome to the march 22nd meeting of hardin county fiscal court i remind you this is a voting meeting if you have cell phones to please turn them off or put them in a vibrate mode we'll begin with a roll call if you would miss stalin that's barry here easter here doug goodman here william here clam wiseman here thompson here ronnie goodman here king here mr doug goodman will lead us to the invocation mr king in the pledge if you'll please stand can you join me in prayer dear god our heavenly fathers we're assembled today we come to offer your praise and glory we ask you guide us in our decisions may we use your best skills and judgment for all the decisions for hardin county peace and harmony prevailing for these things we asked in jesus name amen amen could you please join me in the pledge i pledge allegiance to the fight of the united states of america and to be republican for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all we'll begin this afternoon with

informational items uh first off today we have the two water districts to give us their annual reports uh we'll start out with water district number one and mr stephen hogan good afternoon my judge ladies and gentlemen i'm stephen hogan district one hardin county water district number one i'm the general manager our annual report um we'll jump right in so we'll start with some of the board action items we've had several folks retire this year first brett files after 18 years with the district second was tim osborne who had 10 years with our district but what that doesn't say is that he actually served almost 20 years with meade county water district so he had more than 30 years with the water service so the board passed another resolution for linda thompson she was 31 years and

i think she was responsible for billing and providing bills for almost 3 million water bills in her 31 years of service so she saw some definite changes with the district we passed another resolution for pat flanagan our hr specialist he is retired retired retired as he says he's enjoying life in the rocker on the front porch taking care of mrs flanagan so things are going well for him so another item that we're working on is our usrda loan this comes with some good news bad news so [Music] the loan is for well let's back up we passed a resolution 1780 27 that allowed us to make application for federal monies from the u.s rural development as a usrda administration so the amount is 995 000 it's intended to do improvements for the pearl spring water treatment plant we'll upgrade the gray lane well the pearl spring

raw water influence station as well as a booster station out near the brisbane rizendine tank area now we're having troubles in the actually out outlying county area when we raise the pressure to build the tank we're blowing up our lines it's a reoccurring problem so we hope to resolve that issue again as i mentioned it's a 995 000 loan 40 years two and a quarter percent but it also comes at a cost we have to adjust the water rates we've spoken with this with our joint board meeting back end of last year a judge to have a combined board meeting and we've discussed this as you see there that's a chart of our rates and revenues you'll see in 2019 it hit the bottom part of that is our obligations to the state for the county retirement system and then you see some of the rebound effect but it's not getting any better and i want you to keep in mind this analysis was done in 2019 this doesn't contemplate the issues we had through

2020 and covid or 20 and 21 or even 2022 where now we're seeing the inflationary amounts hit this is one of those ugly tailing charts this is the margin on the uh the revenue that we received our buying documents indicate we need to maintain at least a 10 margin as you can see in a chart and the dips are a cause of the what's called op ed that's other other pension expenses that keep coming up from the state so every time we book those we dip below and dip low and dip below the good news is on the far end of the chart the yellow we predict us to start rising once we get our rate adjustment in place there's been news about the amount of the rate adjustment so let's let's dive into what that entails the chart you see before you is a rise in the median household income for hardin county much less the msa area of elizabethtown and fort knox

we are victims of our own success we're doing better we're doing well but that gives you an idea of the increase in income around the area the next chart will be a little detailed but we've gone through and calculated what each and every customer might see as an increase on the whole i'll cut to the chase the average customer will see 30 cents a day about nine dollars that's on average now if you use more water you you'll see more it'll cost if you use less you won't pay as much so our customer base is typically around three to four thousand gallons per month and if you look in the area there in the orange area to the right you'll see that the base bill will end up being eight dollars and 38 cents and then the increase per thousand for a customer that uses four thousand gallons will be about nine dollars a month so nine dollars a month is what we're talking about uh the lower right uh the curve there

is our customer distribution line and you see as the the peak there is right in the three thousand to four thousand gallon range as a comparison to other utilities we compare hardinsburg meade county uh kentucky american which is lexington litchfield utilities city west point the city of vine grove harden water district 2 city of muldraw city of brandenburg and louisville water company the yellow line will indicate what our new rate is proposed that puts us right in line with over half of the local area utility providers additionally we looked at the district rates versus kentucky rural water association and the canyon and canon incorporated rate study they did not do one for 2020 obviously the coveted reasons but by projection we would still be less than the average of the state at an average bill of 45.85 so what has been published is that the rate

is 41.2 percent and that is an accurate number we've not had a rate increase since 2017 so you can average that out to be about eight percent per year again this is directed from u.s rda the loan and the charts were analyzed by folks up in washington d.c for the agency and based on median household income they're indicating that your water bill should be approximately one percent of that median household income that's how they set the rate it also gives us debt service coverage as well as covers the expenses for the new new work hopefully that's all the bad news i've got so we've updated several other personnel policies by the board as well so looking at our capital improvements in 2021 it was kind of a challenge again coming out of covid so we only completed about 500 000 worth of work at fort knox uh those were three projects we completed the water tanks which we've