Why Should We Save Water?

 

            I agreed with ninety-five percent of the Mayor’s Proclamation, “Imagine a day without water,” I really liked the word, “vital.”  I agreed right up to the end, where she asked us to please help the city provide clean, pressurized water by conserving it.

          How does buying less of the product the utility is selling help the utility, the ratepayers or anything in any way?  Selling water is now vital to paying its overhead.

Utilities are high-overhead businesses.  From the time our water system was built until the nineties, we paid all the overhead, the monthly expenses of the system, in monthly base rates, and only marginal unit costs in unit rates. 

No matter how much or little we used the service, the overhead was paid every month and base and unit rates stayed low and stable.  If we had a breakdown in the plant that kept it from treating any water for a month or more, the overhead and unit costs would still be paid, and our water utility would not go bankrupt.

Since sometime in the nineties, ratepayers have been charged rationing rates on water, with a lower base rate and higher unit rates.  Unit charges were most of my bill in summer of 2001.  But few people stopped watering until 2006, when rates were restructured to greatly discourage irrigation.  The base rate dropped more, and units were hiked enough to make many people stop watering, the easiest use to cut, as the Great Recession began.  Banks didn’t water their repossessed properties, either.

Two years later, Staff told the Council that the new rates were working too well.  People had conserved so much that the utility was unable to pay its overhead!  Staff asked Council to raise the base rate back to where it had been before, which would stabilize the rates. 

But use kept dropping, and both base and unit rates kept rising.  Unit rates are too high.  We’ve been chasing the overhead and cheating on maintenance ever since as rates keep rising faster than inflation. It is the easiest overhead item to cut, just like watering is for homeowners and banks.  Now our ninety-year-old water plant is slowly falling apart and we have to build a new one.

I had a live-in boyfriend.  After two years, I knew I couldn’t marry him.  After ten years, I decided to stop making the same mistake every day and gave him thirty-day notice. 

We’ve had over twenty years of water-rationing rates, fifteen years of seriously rationing rates.  When will we stop making the same mistake? 

                             

Three-minute comment to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-20-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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