Water Committee

VILLAGE OF BIRON 451 KAHOUN ROAD, WISCONSIN RAPIDS, WI 54494 WATER UTILITY COMMITTEE MEETING MINUTES May 13th, 2025 3:30 P.M. Members Present: Jamie Biegel, Chairperson; Patty Gapen and Mark Honkomp, Committee Members Others Present: Kayla Lumaye, Water Superintendent 1. Chairperson Jamie Biegel called the meeting to order at 3:36 P.M. 2. Discuss water tower work – Kayla stated the inside of the tower was painted on Saturday April 10th. It takes 10 days to cure, so the tower will be filled on Wednesday April 21st. Once filled, a safe bacteria sample must be pulled prior to retuning the tower to full service. The goal is to have the tower back in service by Friday April 16th. With the tower offline additional testing was required by the WDNR. The WDNR requested total phosphorus and total suspended solids be tested for weekly. Next week will be the last week of testing. The weekly test costs $69.60 and test were ran for 6 weeks for a total of $417.60. 3. Discuss committee responsibilities – The committee reviewed their responsibilities. They had no changes to make. 4. Superintendent’s report - Kayla stated that Peggy and her met with the maintenance manager for Mariani, Sean Sorenson, on April 30th. Sean had noticed that they were getting billed for water twice. Sean noticed this because Peggy was able to break up their billing and bill them for each building rather than one bill for all buildings as previously done. Sean would like a credit applied to their account for this. Kayla is working with Peggy and Workhorse to figure if a credit will be issued or how we will proceed. If it is found that a credit is necessary, Kayla is to call Jamie and get approval prior to issuing the credit. Kayla then explained how this happened. There is a main meter that feeds each building in the fire protection room and there are 3 buildings with process tanks. Each tank has a process water meter. The process water meter was where they were double billed, since the water was already billed at the main meter. The meter in building 1 has been in since Mariani purchased the buildings from Midwest Cold Storage in November of 2021. That meter was set up as a deduct meter up until February of 2025. It would deduct all the water going to the tank because 90% of the water is evaporated during processing. In March of 2025 a meter was added on the outlet pipe of the tank. When the meter was added, the process water meter was changed from a deduct meter to billing water only and the meter on the outlet was billed wastewater only. That change was made to properly account for the water being evaporated out of the tank. The process water meter in building 3 was billed as a deduct meter in February of 2025. After that both the process water meters in buildings 3 and 4 were set up to bill water only. Additionally, a meter was added in March of 2025 in building 3 to account for a hose that was being used occasionally. That meter was also double billing.  Patty asked how this could happen especially the new meter installs. Kayla explained that she had several meetings with Sean and our meter technician, Dan McCulloch. Our focus at those meetings was to figure out how to properly account for the water going into the tank and the water coming out of the tank. Because of focusing on that we all lost site of the overall picture and did not realize that the process meter was double billing them. Kayla will go through the billing registers from Workhorse and figure out how to proceed. 5. Set next meeting date and time The next meeting will be held on July 9th at 8:30 AM. Motion to Adjourn: Mark Honkomp, second by: Jamie Biegel Time: 3:59 p.m. Minutes Respectfully Submitted by: Kayla Lumaye, Water Superintendent