By Don Urquhart, Times Chronicle

Osoyoos residents within town boundaries will join their compatriots in other Okanagan municipalities with a move to separate out and charge utilities separately from the annual property tax. 

Currently, the user fees for water, sewer, and garbage (utilities) are included in the town’s property taxes, an issue that compounded the controversial tax hike discussions earlier this year.

Neighbouring municipalities such as Oliver and Penticton bill and collect utility services quarterly, while Summerland bills and collects monthly.

Council had earlier directed staff to remove these charges from the tax notice and create a separate billing. At the August 13 regular council meeting, council voted in favour of separate billing for water, sewer and garbage user fees on a quarterly basis starting in 2025.

Town administration are currently working with the accounting software, Central Square (Vadim) to create utility accounts for all municipal tax accounts.

Jim Zakall, Director of Finance/ Deputy CAO said it involves “the conversion of our property tax database into our utility database so that we don’t have to input absolutely every customer into our account, adding that the town is working with the financial software provider to do that transition to save us some time.”

Full conversion is scheduled to be completed by late 2024, he added.

Councillor Johnny Cheong raised the issue of water metering and if the current billing software would interface with the Neptune system to automatically add the water billing rather than staff entering the data by hand.

Neptune is compatible with Vadim which means the meter readings can be uploaded directly and calculated automatically, Zakall said. 

“While we are doing this process we are also working with Neptune and Vadim to be ready for that data conversion for the water metering. We are only creating one utility billing account. It will have the flat rates on there in the meantime as we are building out our universal water metering and we’ll be adding that data. 

He added that the ultimate goal will be to eventually include the water metering charges once all the water meters have been installed but “we’re probably a couple of years away from doing the universal water metering.”

Zakall noted there would be additional costs to the town of approximately $5,000 per billing cycle due to the increased postage and supplies, leading to Cheong to ask if these accounts would be available online to save the physical handling costs. 

“There is the opportunity and ability to have the online system going, we don’t have that currently set up but that is definitely an improvement we can make.” This would take a couple of months to set up, he said.

He noted that this change will be communicated to the property owners in advance to avoid confusion. 

Zakall highlighted that property owners will continue to have the opportunity to pay their utility bills in full for the year, make payments if requested, and be able to make online banking payments as a way to pay their bills with the Town.