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New Powers for Municipal Authorities

Act 57 has broadened an authority's ability to adopt reasonable rules and regulations related to water and sewer lines that are located on private property and owned or leased by a customer. The act also gives the authority the ability to enforce these regulations by referring any violations for prosecution as a summary offense.

In doing so, the act allows the authority to mandate that customers repair or replace leaking water services or broken sewer laterals in order to prevent these malfunctioning facilities from causing infiltration and inflow into the authority's system.

Act 57 also explicitly grants authorities the power to impose a fee for reserving capacity from a property owner who has applied for the service. Although some authorities have already enacted reservation of capacity fees in the past based on Section 9 of Act 203, others hesitated to do so because the fee was not specifically enumerated or authorized in that legislation. Now it is, and specific methodology and limitations are described.

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