It’s as clear as clean water: Hollister movie-goers are just fine holding off until home before they use the restroom.
Hollister City Council members these days are consumed by budget deficits and taxes, but on Monday night they delved into a more sanitary topic of sorts – the amount of sewage use at Premiere Cinemas and how an average single-family household uses more of it on a daily basis than the local movie theater.
That discussion was part of a recommendation approved by the council Monday, from the city’s Development Services Department, to lower the movie theater’s designated sewer impact fee from $142,219 to $30,078. That is equal to the base rate of around $12,000 – plus collection fees that came to about $17,800 for Premiere – which a developer would pay for the same levies on a single-family residence.
Hollister and other jurisdictions charge the normally standardized fees to offset costs for infrastructure, in this case the city’s $100 million-plus wastewater plant completed in 2008 that spurred a major jump in sewer-associated fees for local residences and businesses.
Premiere Cinemas on McCray Street opened in March 2006 and is among several commercial developments built here during Hollister’s moratorium against new sewer connections – a six-year state penalty starting in 2002 after the 15 million-gallon sewer spill into the San Benito River bed. Premiere is anticipating annexation into city limits so it must get off its existing septic system, connect to the reconstructed wastewater plant and pay the related impact fees charged to builders.
Hollister’s impact fees, most recently adjusted in 2009, vary by type of development. There is a flat rate for single-family residences, while commercial buildings are assessed based on square footage.
With such a high variance from home to home and business to business, Premiere’s action could potentially set a precedent and motivate more developers to present data with hopes of curbing such impact fees, acknowledged William Avera, Hollister’s director of development services. But Premiere’s case is a “rare sort of thing” with the pending annexation, he said. When deciding to build the new theater, the developer had no indication where sewer fees would end up, Avera said.
The city official also offered a ballpark figure that annual sales tax revenue for Hollister – from the theater – could come to around $45,000.
“From our perspective,” he said regarding the possibility of more developers challenging the rates, “I don’t think we would necessarily mind that.”
Although Premiere is housed in a nearly 34,000-square-foot building – and often serves hundreds or sometimes thousands of patrons in a day – city data showed that the business actually uses less water flow than the average single-family home, according to a staff report for the council meeting. Considering the industry standard of 226 gallons per day for a single-family residence – the figure used by the city to determine the 2009 sewer impact fee schedule – the average home uses about 226 gallons a day, or around 900 cubic feet of water. Premiere’s records showed that, according to the staff report, “the highest water usage throughout the year is 800 cubic feet or 88% of a single-family residence.”
City and water conservation leaders attributed the relatively paltry flow rates to Premiere’s installation of low-flow fixtures – required for buildings constructed after 1992 – along with a movie theater’s lacking need for laundry and shower facilities and its independent, specialized meter for landscaping. Avera mentioned that Premiere even has several waterless urinals in the men’s bathroom.
Premiere owner Ted Intravia, meanwhile, could not be reached for comment before press time.
“The water usage is what it is,” said Avera. “The only thing we can attribute it to is all the low-flow stuff they have there. They have a few waterless urinals in the men’s restroom. Really, that’s all it is.”
Still, without having expertise on such water conservation, Avera acknowledged he was initially surprised at the low usage and noted he had expected the theater’s flow rates would equal that of at least three single-family homes.
It was less stunning for Shawn Novack, water resources manager for the Water Resources Association of San Benito County. He noted that landscaping, particularly watering of lawns, makes up about 50 percent of all household use. If residents have not replaced their older toilets, those account for around 26 percent of usage. And he said traditional top-loader washing machines are next on the inefficiency list.
There is another sneaky culprit as well, Novack said.
“You don’t know how many people have leaks that they’re not aware of,” he said.
