McCandless Township Sanitary Authority
Rate Structure

    All customers within The McCandless Township Sanitary Authority (MTSA) service area are divided into two classes. These classes are residential customers and non-residential customers. Non-residential customers include all commercial, institutional and public customers. There are no industrial customers currently connected to the Authority's sewerage system. The purpose of this categorization of customers is to assure that all customers throughout the service area pay their fair share of sewerage system operating costs on an equivalent basis.

    When designing a suitable and effective rate structure, two major points must be considered. First, there are expenses related to the loading received at a treatment facility and that are considered variable. Secondly, there are also fixed expenses, which do not depend upon loading received at the treatment facility. Therefore, every year there must be guaranteed revenues to cover the fixed expenses as well as revenues to cover variable expenses related to system operations. The rate schedule must also treat every class of customer uniformly.

    All customers pay a Base Service Charge, which will meet the costs of administration and bonded debt. The two categories of Residential Customers and Non-Residential Customers each have a distinct User Charge based on water consumption to meet the costs of collection conveyance and treatment of sewage.

    All of the Authority's residential customers served by a private water supply are billed the User Charge based on the estimated average wastewater discharge of metered residential customers, along with the Base Service Charge.

    The Authority has been successful in revising its billing procedure to reduce billing and collection costs and to improve cash flow. Specifically, customers are billed once each quarter, and the authority has instituted a collection procedure for all delinquent accounts.