Price Water to Sell: Petition to the Grants Pass City Council

(Petition Statement, signature side)

We, the undersigned, want our city water to be priced to sell it, not to ration it, so we can use all that we need for all beneficial uses at a low price that stays low.  We would assign all fixed overhead costs into fixed base rates.  Debt service would be paid by a fixed fee and sunset when the debt is paid.  Only marginal unit costs would be assigned to a single unit rate.  Base and unit rates would rise only by actual inflation of costs of the previous year from the year before, not the Consumer Price Index.

This is an advisory petition to the Grants Pass City Council, to request that this matter be discussed and acted upon at a City Council Meeting.  It is not a petition for the ballot. 

Signers must be city residents, landlords, or business owners.

(Back side statement of points)

We Must Price Water to Sell

Council, please pay our water overhead costs with a fixed base rate and debt service fee, and pay only marginal unit costs, those that vary with the number of units produced, in unit rates.  This would provide the lowest, most stable rates, and allow us to use as much water as we need to maintain our properties and keep us all safe from wildfire.

Water is not precious, it is vital.  Precious things are rare and are considered luxuries.  Water is the most abundant resource on Earth.  It is a basic necessity, the basis of life and source of biological wealth.  With high-priced water, there is less life in our city and we have less wealth.

Cleaned fresh water is vital for public health and safety. We must stop rationing it by price.  Water must be priced for all to be able to use for the benefit of all, at the lowest rates that will pay for providing water to each customer for all good uses, particularly watering.

West of the Rockies, we need to water our cities to keep them and the country around them safe to live in.  We live in natural semi-desert, with a cold ocean that doesn’t readily evaporate.  Semi-desert is far more dangerous than real desert, as it grows more fuel to dry out and burn, creating firestorms.  Green grass doesn’t burn; nor do cities full of it.

Low-priced water made Grants Pass clean, green, and safe from wildfire for decades, by allowing everyone with property to grow food and maintain property for beauty and safety.  Into the ‘80s, water service was cheap and we used it freely, as did most cities around the developed world.

Grants Pass city water kept the surrounding countryside moister and safer in summer as well, as the whole city pumped millions of gallons out of our river, into the air and all over plants and the ground, with sprinklers.  Much of it evaporated, to spread outward through the countryside, blowing uphill and upstream with our prevailing west wind, sharing it with other places downwind, making rain to fill our creeks, rivers, and aquifers, making the whole area green and safe from wildfire. 

In the ‘80s, we started being told that fresh water is a scarce, precious resource which we must save--by all means, in all places.  We bought it at the time, never thinking about fire.  Activists talked to city councils, and cities started rationing water by price, lowering base rates, hiking unit prices and even creating tiered rates, higher unit prices for higher use, the opposite of normal unit pricing.

This system is designed to save water, not to sell it.  It doesn’t pay the whole overhead, the fixed costs of owning and running the plant, with a fixed base rate. It pays much of the overhead with high unit rates.  The easiest use to cut is watering.  Less watering doesn’t pay the overhead, so the city raises base and unit rates, further suppressing use, and raises both prices again, in a continual upward-ratcheting spiral of every household paying more to use less water. 

California cities led the way in price rationing, going brown first, sowing drought and reaping wildfire in the last decade, as dry forests, scrub and grassland burn right through dry cities.  We are only 10 years behind them in ratcheting our water prices ever upward, following them into the inferno.

We must stop this upward spiral of water rates and dangerous dry ugliness, and reform our water rate system closer to how we paid in the 1980s.  

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040            rycke@gardener.com