The city of Wells can enjoy a sigh of relief as its tax levy increase will be less than last year’s 9.27-percent increase.

At Wells’ regular City Council meeting, a portion of the meeting was the annual Truth in Taxation hearing. Wells’ original levy proposal was set at 10 percent earlier in the year, but once it came down to it, City Council members did not like the tune of 10 and worked to whittle down the levy numbers.

The hearing, required by law, included city administrator Robin Leslie going over the 2017 budget, which included the local property tax levy, followed by the council certifying the levy.

“It’s going to be difficult to get it below 10 percent,” said Leslie. But, with some finagling and number crunching, the council agreed on a number of their changes to decrease the levy for its residents.

While looking into 2017’s budget, the council worked to reduce their 10 percent levy down to eight percent.

The total amount of dollars proposed for the 2017 tax levy was $975,501, the increase over the 2016 tax levy being $72,260.

What seems like a fairly large hike from last year involves a few different factors, one of them being a $40,000 capital improvement budget for 2017, when 2016’s capital improvement budget was zero.

This is the lowest levy increase Wells has seen since 2014’s tax levy which was an increase of five percent.

At that same City Council meeting, the council decided to have a special meeting slated for Dec. 19 to do some housekeeping for the budget.

The council approved a number of resolutions including creating a new special revenue fund by moving both the Flame Theatre and the deputy registrar funds out of the general fund to its own fund, creating a new project fund for the North Industrial Park, transferring funds from the lottery fund balance to the municipal liquor fund balance for 2016 store improvements, Leslie informed the council this was the same as last year, but was simply moved to cover exterior improvements.

Then the council approved the transferring of funds from the unassigned general fund to various other funds including the Safe Routes to School project fund and the business park fund.

This included a shuffling of dollars for the funds, including two transfers of $65,000 each into the Safe Routes fund. The business park fund, which was negative at the time, had a transfer of $100,000 go in from the general fund.

“Back in June, we decided to do that to make sure we had dollars available for this fund,” said Leslie. Though both funds read as negative, rearranging of dollars should pull them back into positive numbers.

“I think one of our larger issues was that we had estimates that were way off from Bolton and Menk. We went from an estimated $64,000 on a project and the bill came back in upwards of $100,000,” said Leslie.

“When we make mistakes at my business, we pay for them,” said councilman John Herman. “It’s not right that we are paying for Bolton and Menk’s mistakes.”

During that special meeting, the council also spoke on a tabled item seasonal sewer rates. Residents of Wells have had a cap of $27.50 put on their bill for five of the 12 months out of the year from May to September since 2007.

This was set due to summer water being used in gardens and lawns rather than being sent through the sewer system.

“The sewer fund isn’t working the way it should,” said Leslie. “The reason for that is when we had a sewer analysis in 2014, they did not take our seasonal sewer cap into consideration, so our numbers have been off for two years by roughly $100,000.”

“I don’t like increasing anything,” said councilwoman Whitney Harig. “But, this is a necessity.”

The council hopes to have an updated sewer study as well as an updated sewer cap for those summer months in the coming year.

When the numbers were crunched, the council found they have been losing an average of $5.50 per month per customer out of a total of 960 residential customers.

“Our balance is okay, but we need to make up for lost time,” Leslie informed the council.

With that, the council came to a consensus to cut down the special months from five months (May through September) to two months (July and August.) Residents would not go beyond the set cap for those two months, no matter how much the sewer is used. Residents would still pay the full cost of water usage in their homes.

The new suggested cap was set at $31.22 as an average use estimate per customer, creating a $5.52 increase from the previous sewer cap of $25.70, making up for the loss they had since 2014.

The council decided to split the increase in two. The sewer rate would increase $2.75 in 2017, and then increase again by $2.75 in 2018, rounding out the total increase to $5.50.

Leslie reminded council members that this increase would last over a 10 year period, as it did from 2007 to the present with the current cap.

The motion of having an increased cap of $31.20 for those 10 years and splitting the increase into the first two years for the seasonal sewer rates was passed by the council.

The next regular City Council meeting is set for Monday, Jan. 9, 2017.