The city of Columbia Falls is served by a municipal water and sewer system. The utility monthly collects service fees from its customers to cover its operating expenses and indebtedness and reinvests unrestricted surplus in rehabilitating and upgrading the existing system. Neither system has a rate structure that contains a component that provides for enlarging the customer base.

The addition of new customers occurs along extended main line piping where the investment in infrastructure enlarges the service area but does not replace the capacity the system had prior to adding new customers (extra capacity).

The extra capacity is essential to any well operated system. It provides the redundancy necessary to allow the city to address maintenance and repair issues, and provides an ability to meet unusual seasonal demands and emergency demands simultaneously, both without severely reducing customer service.

The city has chosen not to assess the cost of replacing the extra capacity at the time that the main is extended. The city intends to collect that cost from the new customer when they connect to the system. That cost is contained in the plant investment fee. (Ord. 656 § 1(part), 2004)