Orange County Utilities collected about $2.5 million in fees last fiscal year from 107 high-volume commercial customers whose sewage needed special treatment because of pollutants, but an audit found several hundred other customers could be in that category but aren’t paying.
The wastewater streams of more than 700 big-use customers aren’t tested for pollutants, the audit reported.
“Without the required testing, Utilities would be unable to confirm whether surcharges should have been assessed and, if applicable, the amount the customer should have paid,” auditors with Orange County Comptroller Phil Diamond concluded in an 11-page report.
Orange County Comptroller Phil Diamond, pictured at a COVID-19 press briefing earlier this year, released an audit Wednesday that found fault with a program intended to recover costs of treating polluted wastewater from commercial and industrial facilities. (Ricardo Ramirez Buxeda/Orlando Sentinel)
Utilities spokesperson Sarah Lux contends 464 of those commercial customers discharge a daily wastewater flow that the department describes as “residential/domestic in character” and not in need of special treatment by the Environmental Surcharge Program.
Diamond estimated program customers pay an average of about $18,700 a year, though individual bills vary widely.
The audit, which examined the environmental surcharge program over 12 months — January through December 2020 — recommended the Utilities department regularly test every commercial customer with qualifying wastewater volumes at least once a year.
“What this surcharge program is all about is making sure that people that created any extra work pay the cost of cleaning up their extra-strength wastewater,” Diamond said.
Auditors also recommended Utilities develop written procedures for removing accounts from the program.
Established in 2002, the program is intended to recover costs of treating wastewater from commercial and industrial facilities.
Industrial and some commercial waste streams require “extra time, extra effort, extra chemicals, extra testing,” Diamond said.
County code requires routine sampling of customer waste streams that are suspected of containing “abnormally high-strength” pollutants or who are regarded as “significant” commercial users whose daily waste flow exceeds 10,000 gallons at least once in a year.
The audit reported that Utilities, which provides wastewater-treatment services to about 310,000 residential, commercial and industrial customers, sampled 121 of 858 or 14% of all commercial wastewater customers with a volume over the 10,000-gallon threshold in 2020.
The department billed a surcharge to 107 customers.
But another 738 other commercial customers also had daily flow levels over 10,000 gallons.
Those included eight nursing homes; nine hospitals/medical facilities; 10 laundromats; 15 car washes; 29 schools; 35 restaurants; 111 hotels/resorts; and 359 multifamily housing complexes, including apartment buildings and mobile home parks.
Utilities Director Ed Torres said the department has begun to implement the recommendations.
“The primary focus of the program is to protect the treatment process within the wastewater treatment facilities,” he said in a written reply to auditors. “When a customer has been determined by staff to not pose a threat to the wastewater treatment process and the amount of surcharges applied does not cover the cost of sampling and testing, the amount of sampling frequency may be reduced or the participant may be removed from the program as applicable.”
Torres said the department staff determined 464 of the 738 remaining big-use commercial customers or 63% “do not pose a threat to the wastewater treatment process and should not therefore be included in the surcharge program regardless” of flow volume.
The remaining 259 customers include the hotels/resorts, restaurants and hospitals.
The customers that paid the largest surcharge in fiscal year 2020-21 were the Orange County Solid Waste Division, which was billed about $286,000, and the Pepsi Bottling Group Inc., billed $221,000.