Pacific Grove sewer overcharge was Pollution Control Agency's fault, former city staffer alleges.

A few weeks ago, the Weekly reported how an apparent error by Pacific Grove staff led the Monterey Regional Water Pollution Control Agency (PCA) to overcharge P.G. residents on their sewer bills, to the tune of $607,000.

Before the accidental charge took hold in 2012, PCA staff sent the city a letter outlining the steps that would have prevented it. Viewing that moment in hindsight, City Manager Tom Frutchey said his office accidentally failed to respond. “In any case, we did not write back to them," he told the Weekly in mid-April.

Now, a former city staffer has come forward to correct that statement. In an April 28 letter to Frutchey, former P.G. Environmental Programs Manager Sarah Hardgrave alleges PCA is the agency that messed up, increasing the city's sewer rates despite her request that they don't.

After reviewing her handwritten notes and jogging her memory from 2012, Hardgrave writes, she recalled a June 4 phone call between herself, former P.G. Public Works Director Mike Zimmer and former PCA Finances Manager Tom Buell.

According to Hardgrave, Buell told them PCA's planned rate increase would also cause the city's sewer fee, assessed as a percentage of the PCA's, to rise. "We verbally informed Mr. Buell that the city had not been provided sufficient notice to prepare the necessary studies and conduct a Proposition 218 process in advance of the [PCA] increase in their rate," she writes.

Around the same time, she continues, the Regional Water Quality Control Board told the city it needed to update its 2004 Sewer System Asset Management Plan. So Hardgrave and Zimmer got the ball rolling on updates to the sewer management and capital improvement plans "that would become the basis for a rate study and Proposition 218 process to revise the City’s sewer collection fees," she writes.

In December 2012, according to Hardgrave, the city hired a contractor, the Wallace Group, to handle that task and get the Prop. 218 process going.

That year, "My interactions with [PCA] staff were frequent and numerous. During this time, according to my notes and recollection, I received no further inquiry or correspondence from [PCA] on the sewer rate issue," she writes.

"We had thought we had adequately conveyed to [PCA] that there should be no change to the city’s rates until the city had prepared the necessary studies and conducted a Proposition 218 process, and that we undertook to do so in 2012, as I’ve described above."

The P.G. City Council will continue discussing the Prop. 218 process to raise the city's sewer fee this Wednesday, May 6.