Knoxville City Council recently approved amending  the city’s code of ordinances regarding the sanitary user charge system. The amendment gets rid of the user charge system and instead the city will go with a heavier fine based system. The old system was a system that applied to industrial customers or larger sewer output customers with certain limitations on the amount of output of their sewer systems. The city elected to make the change to try to get  higher output customers to stay within their limitations instead of excessively exceeding it on a routine basis.

Knoxville City Manager Aaron Adams tells KNIA/KRLS News by giving more heavy fines to customers who exceed their limit the city believes it will help allow more capacity in the sewer system for residential customers as well as other local businesses. Adams, says with the new system the hope is to not allow large output customers to monopolies the capacity of the city’s wastewater system. The fine based system the city will now use includes a written warning or $1,000.00 fine plus a written response is required with the WasteWater Superintendent explaining the actions that will be taken by the company to eliminate the discharge of pollutants. The fines will increase by $1,000 for every offense following.