Council: Cheap water bought fire safety

 

Honorable Council, Mayor and Manager,

            I was looking over the water section of your website and looked at “The Value of Water” page.  Three brochures were listed and shown: “Clean Clothes;” “Clean Drinking Water;” and “Treated Wastewater.”

            You are missing at least one brochure: “Irrigation and Fire Safety.”  But your pricing of our water does not reflect this.  Your price discrimination between customers and their uses of water has irrigation and fire suppression paying the same top tier price that single-family homeowners pay, which shows that you want to suppress these uses the most.  As Staff pointed out in 2008, irrigation uses the most water and it is most easily cut from household budgets. 

Our city is showing the result in brown, often weedy yards that could burn at a spark.  Last year’s fires have people on edge; they know that Grants Pass could burn in the next katabatic wind event like that of last September. 

Grants Pass did burn, as did many cities, before it had a water treatment plant.  It was rebuilt with brick.  I am sure that they built the water plant to allow our residents to keep their property safe with pressurized water.  They priced water as cheap as possible by the unit and paid for the overhead with base rates.  There was no competition; water service is a natural local monopoly.  The City did it so people could afford to use as much as they needed for every conceivable use.  It resulted in a clean and beautiful city in the 80’s.

Green grass does not burn.  Dry grass and weeds burn hot.   Fresh, cleaned water is not scarce or precious and should not be priced as though it is.  It is abundant and vital to our health, hygiene and fire safety and should be a cheap as possible to use.  Those big storage tanks on our hills give us the pressure to use cleaned water effectively for irrigation and fire suppression, all over the city, making our cleaned river water far superior to water delivered in ditches.

We used to have only one unit price for those who paid the base rate, and it was low, as it covered only the unit costs, those that change with the amount of water produced.  All of our overhead: plant; pipes; equipment; personnel; debt and maintenance; were paid through base rates, monthly charges for monthly bills.  You could go back to that system well before September.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 6-16-2021, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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