Many Poor and Middle Class Can’t Grow Food

    

My backyard garden, 9-4-2014

In 1985 people grew food without thinking about the price of water.
Paying the full water plant overhead monthly with base rates left only pennies on the dollar for unit rates.  Utilities did not depend on use to pay the overhead.  We thought of water as “free from the tap.”  We grew so much food that it was hard to give it away, except to our Food Bank. 

Rationing of water by price in Grants Pass grew slowly from sometime in the 1990s to 2005, when a new city manager hired a rate consultant to set our rates, and my water bill doubled.  Soon water was so costly that our Food Bank bought farmland outside our city to grow food, using volunteers to do the work. 

Such water rationing has cost us a generation of gardeners willing to garden other peoples’ yards, because they never learned how.  It has made the poor and lower middle class poorer every year, as unit rates increase 5.28% above inflation to pay the overhead.  Forty percent of our overhead is paid from water use, which decreases as unit rates increase.  Many people have lost their homes to high utility rates.  

Electricity and Natural gas are also rationed by price, but water and sewer are local monopolies.  Water is not precious; it is vital to health and wealth.  Overpricing use of any utility is not good for utilities or people.  It is theft based on fraud, the idea that these are “scarce and precious” resources.

 1-21-2026 2-minute Speech to Grants Pass City Council 

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook, Nextdoor, and X

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