Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 10-21-2020
A couple of years ago, Staff asked you to pass a debt payment fee for our new water treatment plant, which they said would not increase by inflation, and would go away when the debt is paid. This made me happy; it was a fixed payment for a fixed cost, and in 30 years, it would be gone.
Later I learned that only 60% of
that debt payment would be in that fee.
I assumed that 18% of it would be paid by the Urban Renewal District
that was passed to help us pay for the new plant. But that still leaves 22% of that debt to be loaded
on our rates, an equal percentage rise in the base rate and the unit rates, where
it is set to be compounded
every year by 4.5 times the rate of inflation, and will never go away.
A few weeks ago, I asked our City
Manager if this was correct. He has not
answered my question about the URD’s 18%, but we did learn in the Courier that our water rates will be rising by
6% every year for 5 years to cover the debt not paid by the fee. That is in addition to the 6.78% more we are
paying every year for 1.5% inflation plus 5.28% to cover the overhead that we
are not paying with our decreasing water use.*
Staff tries to make it sound like
they are saving us money somehow by keeping our base rate too low to pay all
the overhead, like we used to before the base started being lowered and part of
the overhead loaded onto our unit rates to make us save water. But each customer has only one base rate; we
use multiple units, and as we collectively cut back on those units, both base
and unit prices are raised to cover that overhead.
We used to pay all of our overhead
with base rates because that was the cheapest way for everybody to pay for
water, and we could use all we needed for any beneficial use, including watering
to keep our city safe from fire. Rates
were stable. Unit charges were literally
pennies on the bill.
Now we are oppressed by high unit charges into paying more and more to
use less and less water. Please cancel
the 6% rate increases and make our debt payment fee and the Urban Renewal
District cover the whole debt. Please do
the same for the sewer plant debt, which is all being paid with our sewer rates.
*I was wrong about this because FCS did not say what was being
paid for in the expected 6.78% rate increases over 4 years that they put in
their March 2020 memo’s rate charts. Staff
said that it does include the
debt service of the planned new plant.
If that is all that their expected increase covers, they are not
planning for increases to cover overhead that have been happening since 2008.
Staff said, after this speech, that the Urban Renewal Agency (not
District) is picking up 18% of water debt service, and that it can be done for
the sewer debt as well.
Comment revised 1/5/21. Shared to RatePayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing: https://www.facebook.com/groups/335132417324336
