Victor Connection Fees Could Reach $25,020 Per Home

VICTOR — The Victor City Council took a step on Oct. 14 toward connection fees of up to $25,020 for each new home that hooks up to city water and sewer.

Idaho lets a city charge a one-time connection fee so that a new home pays its share of the water and sewer system already in the ground. The city's staff report says the fee must be "reasonable, supported by the value and capacity of the existing systems, and dedicated to utility purposes rather than general City expenses." A city can't use it to make money.

So a city sets the fee with a study, the arithmetic that ties the charge to the system it buys into. Victor has two, one for water and one for sewer, from its consulting engineers, Sunrise Engineering, using a method the Idaho Supreme Court upheld in a 1991 case from Hailey, according to the studies. On Oct. 14, the council voted to adopt both and directed staff to prepare the documents needed to adopt the fees they calculate. Putting the fees into effect takes another council vote.

The study's figures are the most the city could charge. "You can charge up to these," Robert Heuseveldt, the Sunrise engineer who presented the study, told the council.

Sunrise calculated $9,867 per home for water and $15,153 for sewer collection. "Connection and installation charges are separate," the staff report says. Heuseveldt set those against $3,420 and $2,125, the connection fees Victor has charged since a 2016 resolution. The new fees would apply "at the time of building permit," not to anything "existing or in process right now." Next to nearby cities, "you guys would be the highest in the area, but that's, that's the calculation." Asked whether that came from Victor's smaller population, he pointed to a spread-out system and to its limits: "you have bottlenecks built in both systems that really limit your capacity."

Sunrise used one formula for both systems, which Heuseveldt summed up as "replacement value, subtract the depreciation, subtract the debt, and then we divide that by the system capacity." Depreciation comes off "because it's not brand new, it's older now," and debt because "people have been paying on it for a while." For Victor's sewer collection system, that is about $44.7 million to replace, minus about $18.7 million in wear and about $700,000 in debt, which leaves about $25.3 million to divide among the equivalent residential units, the demand of one typical home, that the system can serve. The sewer study leaves out the treatment plant and the pipes and pumps Driggs owns. "When we sort things out through Driggs and your agreement," Heuseveldt said, the city will need to establish, "how much capacity you really have in that treatment plant before we can calculate that fee."

Council member Emily Sustick asked what the study's unit count was based on: "The total system capacity?" "Your lift station firm capacity for lift station 1," Heuseveldt answered. A minute later he added, "And if you upgrade the lift station, then I would definitely suggest that changes that denominator drastically, that we revisit this and adopt different money."

Lift Station 1 is the pump station north of town that collects nearly all of Victor's sewage and sends it toward Driggs. With its largest pump out of service, what engineers call firm capacity, it can move 700 gallons a minute. The study counts 0.42 gallons a minute for each unit, so the station has room for 1,667, and each one's share comes to $15,153.

Victor's wastewater facility plan, written by Keller Associates and dated February 2025, puts the station's peak inflow at 650 gallons a minute and labels it "Over Capacity." The plan uses 85% of firm capacity as the upgrade trigger, and 650 is past it. It lists Lift Station 1 upgrades, estimated at $2,735,000, among its first-priority projects for 2025 through 2030. An August 2025 amendment kept them there.

The plan also records a report from Driggs staff that the station "must operate at a reduced capacity to prevent overflowing" Driggs' South Lift Station, which receives Victor's flow. Victor has been running it turned down.

A week earlier, at the council's Oct. 7 retreat, Heuseveldt took up the plan's threshold: "Why do we say 85%? We're not there yet. Because you need time to build a project." Once a station reaches that mark, "it's time to start designing and getting ready to build a replacement." Later in the presentation, he put Lift Station 1 at that mark: "According to the Keller Report, the station number 1 is at that 85% firm capacity, so it's time to think we need to replace it."

At the same retreat, with connection fees "going before council this next month," he called them "probably the lowest hanging fruit, the least controversial."

The study states its choice: "The planning study's 85% firm-capacity threshold is used to trigger planning for improvements; this analysis uses the full existing firm capacity to allocate system value." Run through the study's formula with 85% of the station's capacity, 1,417 units, the sewer fee would come to $17,826, about 18% higher, by The Valley Signal's calculation. The 85% threshold did not come up at the Oct. 14 meeting.

City Administrator Jeremy Besbris said staff "has wanted to do this for a couple of years" but held off while "trying to understand the facility costs." "So we just thought, you know, better to do this now and have to come back and revisit it perhaps in a couple of years, even next year."

Connection fees are separate from the monthly sewer bill, which the council agreed in July to cut by about a third.

What to watch: the council vote on the documents that would set the fees. As of Oct. 18, no posted agenda included them.

Victor Moves Toward Connection Fees of Up to $25,020 Per New Home

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