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Comprehensive Plan Sanitary Sewer Sub -Element Currently, Vero Beach serves those areas outside its corporate limits based on interlocal agreements with the county and the Town of Indian River Shores. While those agreements expire in 2017, the county and/or Town must provide notice to the City by 2012 if either the county or the Town wants to terminate its agreement on the 2017 termination date. In the past, neither the county nor the Town had considered terminating its service area agreement with the City. Recently, however, the City indicated that water and sewer rates would increase significantly in the next few years. Also, due to a surcharge of the rates used to offset the city's general fund, customers became disenchanted with the management of the City of Vero Beach utility system. Besides the rate increases, the lack of representation in City utilities rate setting is also a concern for unincorporated county and Town residents. Unlike city residents, customers living outside the city limits cannot vote in city council elections and therefore have no representation on utility matters. For the reasons outlined above, the county's policy should be to maintain a dialogue with the City and the Town regarding utility service areas and to initiate a study to assess the financial feasibility of consolidating utility services or terminating the City of Vero Beach service area agreement in 2017. That study should address the costs and revenues associated with consolidating utility services or absorbing city utility customers in the unincorporated area and the Town into the county system. System Evaluation and Maintenance The sanitary sewer collection system is evaluated with each application for new development, and as each package treatment plant is decommissioned. That evaluation is done using a computer modeling program, known as the "WaterCad" model that evaluates several factors, including pipe capacity, lift station capacity, horse power requirements for pumps, and hydraulic pump pressure. In contrast to the City of Vero Beach, which is largely built -out and has provided utility service for many decades, sewer service is still relatively new to the rapidly growing unincorporated county. Consequently, the county's collection system is constantly evaluated. Within the county's service area, the major collection system problem is low velocity in force mains. In particular, the 24 inch, 20 inch, and 12 inch force mains in the US 1 corridor have low velocities even at peak flows. The low velocity is caused by oversized lines and a lack of wastewater generated. Where the velocity is less than 2 feet/second, solids will settle in pipelines. Settled solids decrease hydraulic capacity. Another problem occurs when a mass of accumulated solids become "unsettled" and reaches a treatment plant in an unexpectedly large concentration. In the past, this situation has resulted in sewage spills. While increased pipeline maintenance is necessary to prevent a reoccurrence of such spills, the recent installation of numerous automatic air release valves has corrected the problem by relieving gases that were preventing the normal flow of sewage through influent Community Development Department Indian River County 25