Just over a dozen residents turned out for a town-sponsored open house related to the new environment fee, and they expressed some confusion and had a lot of questions.

The open house was the second such meeting the town hosted but the first to take place after residents received a letter from AMS Billing Services, a Florida company the town has hired to bill and collect the fee.

Several residents even had questions about whether the letter was legitimate or some sort of scam, according to Town Manager Grady Miller.

“We also received a number of phone calls from people who were not aware the fee was being implemented,” Miller said.

It was November 2014 that the council approved the plan to collect a fee of $3 per month from owners of each land parcel in Fountain Hills.

The revenue from the fee would be used to fund various requirements of the EPA, U.S. Clean Water Act and the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) that the town must comply with.

Programs that could be covered under the fee include street sweeping, dust control, dam inspections (the town has six dams under the jurisdiction of the Arizona Department of Water Resources it must maintain), and storm water management and wash drainage maintenance.

There are also needs for on-call storm damage clean-up and providing citizens with an option of household hazardous waste disposal (paint, household chemicals, etc.).

Miller said residents also wondered why the town needed to get outside help to collect the fee.

The town did ask the Sanitary District, Republic Services and EPCOR Water if they would help with the billing. Miller said they all declined, primarily because of the significant difference between billing households as they do versus every parcel, which the town needs to do.

The town advertised for qualifications and proposals for contractors to do the work.

AMS Billing Services, a Sarasota, Fla. company, was the only bidder. They met the qualifications the town was looking for, and could do the job cheaper than the town establishing and maintaining an in-house operation.

The $3 per month fee is being billed as a single annual collection of $36.

Miller also said residents raised concern over the appearance of inequity with single-family homes paying the same as commercial sites.

When the council first started discussing the fee as early as 2007, there was some consideration of trying to base the fee on square footage or hard surface for runoff.

The Arizona Legislature ended that discussion when it passed a law that any such fees collected by municipalities or other political subdivisions could only be flat fees and not based on assessed valuation, zoning or size of structure.

Miller said that without the fee the town could face fines for non-compliance or further reducing other services more severely.

The fee could collect about $540,000 on an annual basis. The cost of billing through AMS is $85,000. The bills will arrive in January.