Mid Murray Council presently has 28 Community Wastewater Management Systems (CWMS), and is responsible for the maintenance, renewal and compliance requirements of SA Health, the Essential Services Commission of South Australia (ESCOSA), and the Local Government Act and Regulations.

An annual service fee is raised to maintain the systems. The revenue raised from this charge can only be applied to maintenance, renewal and upgrades of the specific scheme and only to those properties that have the ability to access the service are levied.

In previous years, Council has set the annual service fee based on the balance of accumulated funds (surplus/deficit) of each scheme along with the previous five (5) year’s operating costs to project the future year’s annual service fee. This fee setting did not include the recovery of internal indirect/overhead costs or the funds necessary to cover all of the future renewal of the system’s infrastructure costs, being the annual depreciation expense.