NASHVILLE — East Ridge officials’ hope of gaining more voting power on the Hamilton County sewer authority washed down a legislative drain Wednesday after county Mayor Claude Ramsey spoke out against their bill.
“I hope you will defeat this bill,” Mr. Ramsey told members of the State and Local Government Committee’s Local Government Subcommittee.
The mayor, who served in the Legislature in the 1970s, said the Hamilton County Water and Wastewater Treatment Authority now is “working very well.”
“These smaller municipalities are giving up their sewer systems, giving their problems to the WWTA,” he said. “We’re dealing with them, and we think it works just fine the way it is.”
On a voice vote, subcommittee members later postponed consideration of House Bill 2900 until March 11, 2011, effectively killing the bill, which will have to be reintroduced next year when a new General Assembly takes office.
PDF: Senate amendment 0829
The bill was sponsored by Rep. Vince Dean, R-East Ridge, who has said he expected it to run into trouble in the Legislature.
Earlier Wednesday, East Ridge City Manager William Whitson told lawmakers that the current voting structure of the 12-member treatment authority is based on population and gives too much voting weight to the county’s five members, whom he said represent one-fifth of the county.
Each of the seven cities that have joined the authority have one voting member. Mr. Whitson said that is unfair, noting that, although East Ridge has a population of about 20,000, the city has about 10,000 sewer users out of the estimated 25,000 to 26,000 users countywide.
“We believe a more fair and equitable way to have voting structures set up is a customer base and focused in that way as opposed to population base, and that is the basic purpose of our request,” Mr. Whitson said.
Red Bank also supported the legislation.
But Ramsey special assistant Mike Carter, who doubles as the authority’s attorney, said the distribution of voting power is not controlled by population but according to state statute under the creating entity, in this instance, Hamilton County. The $6 million bond issue that originally funded the WWTA was issued by Hamilton County, he said.
WWTA MEMBERSThe Hamilton County Water and Wastewater Treatment Authority is governed by a board comprising five members appointed by the county mayor and a representative of each member city:* East Ridge* Lakesite* Lookout Mountain* Red Bank* Ridgeside* Signal Mountain* Soddy-Daisy
Different cities “that were facing massive costs in repairing old systems began to come into the (WWTA) and were given a representative” but not equal representation because the statute “doesn’t provide for that,” he said. “They (cities) provided none of the seed money and none of the bond issues to create and operate the system.”
Mr. Carter said he was representing Mr. Ramsey and not the authority, which he said has no position on the bill.
Rep. Curry Todd, R-Collierville and chairman of the full State and Local Government Committee, said “Hamilton County went in and paid all the debt off” for East Ridge and other cities in the system.
Rep. Ben West, D-Nashville, raised concerns that five other water and wastewater treatment authorities created under the statute could have problems with the changes.