The Winthrop Utilities District holds a public hearing Tuesday on the 7.5% sewer rate increase set to begin Jan. 1. From left: Office Manager Kate Rosenbaum, Superintendent Daniel Wells and Larry Merrifield, Richard Coleman and Roger Hanson, the district’s three trustees. Ethan Horton/Kennebec Journal

WINTHROP — The nearly 1,000 customers of the Winthrop Utilities District will see a 7.5% increase in their sewer rates beginning Jan. 1 as the district collects funds to upgrade its eight sewer pumps, officials said.

The district held a public hearing on the increase Tuesday night, with only three residents attending to hear the proposal and express concerns about the increase.

Nick Henry, the district’s contracted rate consultant, said Tuesday the increase would likely only be about $12 per quarter for most customers, but those using more than the minimum of 1,500 cubic feet per quarter could see higher increases.

The increase, approved unanimously Tuesday by the three members of the district’s board of trustees, would help pay for a $4.3 million project to upgrade the district’s eight sewer pumps. The pumps were installed between 1959 and 1984 and are well past their projected operating lives, Winthrop Utilities District Superintendent Daniel Wells said.

A 2022 report by Dirigo Engineering showed the eight pumps, which are generally expected to last 20 to 30 years, were “well beyond their design life,” had “antiquated” equipment and showed “significant corrosion.” Even the generator powering the pumps, the report said, was more than 50 years old and the power receptacles were not up to modern standards and codes.

“The oldest one is on Mechanic Street — 1959 vintage, some of the equipment is still 1959 vintage,” Timothy Sawtelle, an engineer with Dirigo Engineering, said. “It’s applying for Social Security, I think. Or Medicare, or something like that. It’s an old station.”

A failure of any of the stations could result in sewer back-ups in homes and businesses, spills onto streets and into waterways, expensive contractor repairs and extensive outages of the sewer network — which the district considers “an unacceptable operating and financial risk.”

“The issue is here, if we have a failure, it’s going to be quite expensive, and it can be quite a mess,” Roger Hanson, the treasurer of the board of trustees, said. “The five items we listed here, like the sewer backups to customer locations, these are the things we desperately want to avoid.”

More than half of the project is funded by a federal grant, while the other portion will be funded by in-kind contributions from Wells, $400,000 from a capital improvements reserve fund and a $1.25 million bond, the primary force behind the rate increase.

District leaders said they expect another rate increase at the beginning of 2026 to continue to fund the project and keep up with rising costs. The exact amount of the increase will be decided toward the end of 2025 to ensure project costs can be paid, and so the district can use another year of operating expenses to determine how much more the district will need to raise on a regular basis.

Though the second step of the rate increase had been discussed at previous meetings and was mentioned in the information packet given to residents at Tuesday’s public hearing, it was not mentioned in letters sent to residents ahead of the hearing, which resident Victor Martinez said was concerning, and that “maybe people would react differently” to a two-step increase than the one-step increase that was advertised in the letter.

Wells and members of the board pushed back, saying they made the proper disclosures and clarifying that they were not approving the second step until late next year.

The trustees also unanimously approved a 1.5% increase in next year’s water rate to keep up with rising costs. The increase was small enough that a public hearing was not required by state regulators, Wells said.