Developers sue Manheim Township for $1 million in water-connection fees

Five area developers are suing Manheim Township for a minimum $1 million, saying it imposed a water-connection fee that they believe is illegal and inflated, the developers’ attorney said Wednesday.

An attorney is seeking class-action status for the lawsuit, saying it affects property owners charged the connecting fee.

“Defendants are using an unelected body — the General Municipal Authority — to impose a tax; that’s illegal,” attorney Edward Robson, of Robson & Robson, the Conshohocken law firm that filed the suit, said Wednesday.

“Even more incredible,” Robson said, “they have acknowledged errors in the tapping fee calculation and not offered any refund.”

Sean Molchany, Manheim Township’s manager, said Wednesday that he had not had time to read the lawsuit and therefore could not comment.

A telephone message left for Sam Mecum, a township commissioner and secretary of the Manheim Township General Municipal Authority, was not immediately returned. The authority is named as a codefendant.

The developers named as plaintiffs in the lawsuit are: C&F Inc., Hess Home Builders and Horst & Son, all of Manheim Township; and Your Towne Builders and Cooper Custom Homes, both of East Hempfield Township.

At issue in the suit — filed Aug. 22 in Lancaster County Court of Common Pleas and served at the township office Tuesday afternoon — are fees Manheim Township charges to connect to municipal water.

Robson seeks class-action status for the lawsuit, meaning people charged the tapping fee since Aug. 22, 2012, would be considered plaintiffs in the suit unless they opted out.

The lawsuit claims Manheim Township has been collecting the water-tapping fee — which Robson estimated at $5,600 or more per connection — illegally for at least two years. That’s because, the suit says, township agreements with Lancaster city permitting the fees have expired.

Those agreements allowed the township to collect water-tapping fees to cover the cost of making the connections to the city’s water mains. Upon their expirations, the collections must cease, the suit says.

The township’s continued collection of the fee violates the Pennsylvania Municipality Authorities Act, the plaintiffs allege.

And the township is violating the same state law and the U.S. and state constitutions, the suit says, by continuing to levy a fee inflated by charges it would not be permitted to include even if was allowed to charge a tapping fee under the act. The township and the authority have known the fee was inflated since they acknowledged the error in a 2011 lawsuit, the suit says.

In addition to $1 million in tapping fees paid over the past two years, the suit seeks to prevent the township and its general authority from continuing to collect the fee.

The suit is important, Robson said, not only to allow developers to obtain building permits without having to pay the tapping fee but to eliminate a hidden tax on property owners.

“(Manheim Township and its municipal authority) have been able to keep their conduct ‘under the radar’ because the complexity of municipal financing arrangements makes it very difficult for the lay property owner to know he or she has been overcharged,” Robson said.

Source: Lancaster Online