The Rio Dell City Council is set to vote on a budget tonight that would result in the Rio Dell Volunteer Fire Department receiving a water bill from the city for the first time ever.

The new budget, which the city council will vote on at its regular meeting tonight at 6:30 p.m., anticipates charging the Rio Dell Volunteer Fire Department around $7,000 annually for water and sewage services. The charges would apply only to water usage at the firehouse itself, City Manager Jim Stretch told the Outpost this morning – water used for firefighting would still be provided by the city free of charge.

Still, that $7,000 is a pretty big hit for an agency with a budget of only about $80,000 a year – and which is currently dipping into its reserves to make ends meet. Chief Shane Wilson said this morning that if the new water fees pass, then his department would be forced to seek new sources of revenue – possibly by charging the city for fire protection services, another move without precedent in the history of the small riverside town’s intergovernmental relations.

“I don’t know if it’s a declaration of war with the fire department or what, but it’s definitely unnecessary,” Wilson said.

Why is the city looking to start billing the VFD? It’s not just the usual local governmental budget woes, according to Stretch. Rather, he said, the city just recently learned about a court case coming out of the city of Davis that suggests Rio Dell’s system of accounting and billing for municipal water use may be in violation of the California constitution. Rio Dell has been working on its 2014-15 budget for months, now, but it posted an adjustment to the budget – including the fire department fees – only late last week, in an attempt to address the possible unconstitutionality.

At the heart of the argument is Proposition 218, which was passed by the voters in 1996. It required all new special property tax assessments – those covering municipal water service, parks, garbage collection and the like – to be put before voters. The California Supreme Court later held that Prop. 218 covered regular service bills as well. In the words of the Ballotpedia summary linked above, the ruling held that “a local jurisdiction cannot charge one group of water, refuse or sewer ratepayers in order to subsidize the fees of another group of water, refuse or sewer users.”

This Supreme Court ruling was, in turn, used in a lawsuit that a local taxpayers’ association brought against the City of Davis last year. The suit charged – among other things – that Davis city government had neglected to bill itself for the amount of water it uses. Ratepayers, it charged, were unfairly subsidizing the city’s own use of water.

Though the city won the lawsuit earlier this year, it is unclear whether the city conceded the point about billing itself for its own usage of water. (Officials in Davis city government could not be reached today.) Nevertheless, Rio Dell is proceeding as if the argument brought by the taxpayers’ group is valid.

“Our attorney is saying the City of Davis really did fold on this,” Stretch said.

With that in mind, the proposed budget that Stretch will present to the city council tonight includes not only a water and sewage bill for the volunteer fire department, but new water bills for its public works department. Every time the plants along the median strip along Wildwood Drive are watered, one city department will receive a bill from another.

Stretch seems to be acting out of an abundance of caution rather than absolute legal necessity. Regardless of whether or not the city of Davis conceded the relevant point, it is not in any sense a settled, binding matter of law – the Davis ruling came from one Yolo County Superior Court judge and not a state-level appellate court.

The point is not lost on Chief Wilson. “I don’t know why the city of Rio Dell the first city in California to act on [the Davis case],” he said. “Why is the city manager of our little town in northern Humboldt County being the innovator of this?”

One more controversial matter: If the city will not bill the fire department for water used to fight fires, how is the proposed bill so high? Out of the new $7,000 bill proposed for the VFD, about $5,500 is for water and the rest for sewage. How does a small, rarely manned firehouse use up $5,500 worth of water in a year? Stretch said that the figure was merely an estimate, and suggested that the VFD has been profligate with their lawn-watering and the like. Wilson, meanwhile, holds that the city seems to be looking to bill the fire department for the water it uses while training its firefighters – by far its biggest expenditure of the resource, he said.

The Rio Dell City Council meets at City Hall – 675 Wildwood Dr. – tonight at 6:30 p.m. It promises to be lively.

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