Wastewater & Stormwater User Fees and My Bill

Your bill is a combined fee which includes a Metropolitan Wastewater Management Commission (MWMC) charge plus a flow-based fee. The flow portion of your wastewater bill is based on units of water consumed. One unit equals 748 gallons. The flow-based fees are determined from actual water meter readings during the winter months (December through April). For May through November, the bills are based on the average of the winter usage or the actual usage, whichever is less. For single-family-dwelling accounts with fewer than three months’ usage, bills are based on seven (7) units or actual usage, whichever is less.

The wastewater fees you pay go to build, operate, and maintain Springfield’s wastewater collection system and MWMC’s regional wastewater conveyance and treatment system. All wastewater must be collected and treated to meet state and federal water quality standards before it is discharged into the Willamette River. Some examples of the work conducted annually include: about 224 miles of Springfield wastewater lines are inspected, approximately 40,000 feet of Springfield wastewater lines are repaired or replaced, and numerous local and MWMC pump stations are operated and maintained. Every year, about 11-13 billion gallons of wastewater are treated, 2,000-3,000 dry tons of biosolids are processed, and over 29,000 water quality tests are conducted to ensure that water quality standards are met. Some of the wastewater fees are also used to construct new facilities and implement a federally-required industrial pretreatment and pollution prevention program.

The cost of sending clean water to a customer is considerably less than cleaning and purifying water discharged into the wastewater system so that it can be returned to the Willamette River.

There are several ways to check your plumbing for a leak. The most common leak we see is a silent toilet leak. To check for one, put a few drops of food coloring into the tank of the toilet and wait several minutes. If the color seeps into the bowl, you have a leak.

A good way to check if you have a leak somewhere in your system is to do an overnight meter read. You just write down the reading on your meter before you go to bed for the night (make sure no water gets used over night). Then read the meter again in the morning before you use any water. If the number changes, you have a leak somewhere. You can also do this when you are going to be out of the house for the day.

Most of the meters in use today have a flow detector on them. This is a small red triangle inside a bubble located under the numbers on the meter. When you are using water, the triangle spins. If you are not running anything that uses water and the triangle is spinning, you probably have a leak.

Stormwater fees are necessary to fund Springfield’s federally required stormwater management program, which includes: cleaning and maintaining 6,250 catch basins, sweeping 6,000 miles of paved streets, maintaining stormwater features such as ponds, swales, and wetlands and administering a number of public education programs.