Cities ration water by rates

The Grants Pass City Water Treatment Plant is being replaced, because of neglect in the first two decades of water rationing by rates.

 @AGPamBondi Of all our utilities, water is the most dangerous to ration by rates, but the vast majority of cities in the U.S. are doing just that, over the last 40 years. It is done by dropping the base rate and hiking unit rates by labeling much of the overhead as unit costs, ignoring normal pricing accounting.

The idea is to make people cut back on water use. Every city does this in their own way, but they all start with decreasing the base rates and increasing the cost of units. It makes cities depend on high unit prices to pay overhead, but high unit prices make people cut back on use. Cities raise the unit rates higher and higher; eventually the base rates are increased as well, creating a vicious pricing spiral that can't be stopped until we can't cut back anymore.

Electric and natural gas utilities also have rationing rates, but they at least compete with each other. Water and sewer are city monopolies. But rationing rates are bad for utilities, government, and ratepayers. They are literally a crime: wasted water running to the ocean instead of watering land first; fraudulent science; and abuse of ratepayers.

I started the Ratepayers Revolt in Grants Pass, OR with water and sewer, which has even higher rates than water, with the introduction of sewer unit rates, based on winter water use. I am currently giving 2-minute speeches on water to our City Council. They are becoming receptive to the idea of putting my proposed Charter Amendment on the ballot to bring our rate system back to the days when water was cheap to use and sewer was all base rates.

https://gardengrantspass.blogspot.com/2025/05/a-proposed-charter-amendment-utility.html

3-18-26, published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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

Anonymous Prophets of Drought

 

When people can't afford to water their yards, they often neglect to cut their weeds.  Grants Pass depends on citizens to report property neglect, but few do so.  We had two decades of drought until the eruption of Hunga Tonga, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, blew its top on January 15th, 2022, sending 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere, though the flooding of California and other places started in September of that year, and continued through winter and spring.  Fall to late spring rain and flooding around the globe are expected to continue for another two years.

In 1986 in Grants Pass, we were told that we would be in drought that year, so “Don’t water your lawns or wash your cars.”  We had 103 days without rain that year, 97 days the next.

 In 1986, we first started hearing a new meme in the media: “Fresh water is a scarce and precious resource!  Only 2 percent of the water on earth is fresh water, and it must be conserved!”

 Interestingly, no one stepped up to write a book about it like Bill McKibben did about carbon dioxide and global warming.  This was because the movement to ration our water by rates, the way electricity and natural gas have been rate-rationed for over 50 years, required rationing of water to provide evidence for global warming.  

Water vapor is the most abundant and powerful greenhouse gas, but it also cools and thus moderates temperatures.  Their push to tax carbon dioxide has always been noisy; rate-rationing of water has been very quiet.

Building water treatment plants allowed cities to bring clean water to every building and fire hydrant, protecting both the cities and the surrounding countryside from wildfires, using irrigation and evaporation. 

But rate-rationing of city water has stopped our rain, because not enough people are watering.  Please bring back the rate system that will give us cheap water to use again.

                                            1-7-2026 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

Hiking units for a new water plant

 

Our old water plant.  The new one has only started to be built, a few blocks away.

 At your workshop, City Manager and Staff went straight to hiking our already high unit rates to satisfy lenders that we can pay the debt we are about to incur.  But higher unit rates bring lower use, which staff habitually fix by hiking unit and base rates even higher. 

Lenders will be satisfied if you would return our rate system to what worked for 50 years: paying all the overhead, monthly bills that do not rise or fall with production, including debt payments, maintenance and contingency funds, with our monthly base rates, and charging one low unit rate to pay costs that rise and fall with production of cleaned water.

The time to start doing it is tonight, by voting no.

Water is not precious, it is vital. Rationing our water is killing plants, animals and people, with drought, fires and floods. Rationing water by high unit prices has returned our weather to the time before water plants were built, when cities burned and forest fires were huge.

We don’t want our city to burn.  We want it to be clean, green and beautiful, like it was in 1985, when we watered our yards because water was cheap to use.

 

11-5-2025

Published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com and shared on Facebook

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

Conjoined Conspiracies, 3-minute commentary

 

            I came to Grants Pass in the fall of 1984.  I left it in the fall of ‘86.  Our utility bill was about $25: $20 for water and $5 for sewer.  It got up to $26 with summer watering.  It seemed like we had thundershowers every weekend of that summer. 

            In the spring of ’86, we were told we were in drought; don’t water lawns or wash cars.  We had 100 days without rain that summer.

            ‘86 was the year that I kept hearing two new memes all through the media: global warming; and conserve fresh water.   I bought them both at the time.

I returned to Grants Pass in ‘99 and became a professional gardener.   My utility bill was about $35 in winter and up to $75 in summer.  The base rate for water was only $12; sewer was $20; water units were the rest.

In 2006, Grants Pass started tiered water pricing with an $8 base rate and much higher unit rates.  My water bill nearly doubled.  My city customers started to let part of their properties go dry. In ‘08, Staff told the City Council that they needed to raise the base rate from $9 to $12 to pay the overhead and “stabilize the rates,” because people had cut back so much on watering.  The Council did, but rates did not stabilize, because people were cutting back more.  High unit rates do that.

In 2013, I did a study of summer temperature and rainfall in Grants Pass over the previous 30 years.  It showed that Grants Pass had lost almost an inch of summer rain per decade.  In the ‘80s, we had bigger rain events in July and August, the middle of the irrigation season, than in June and September.  That reversed in the ‘90s and reversed further in the '00s, when we got tiered rates.  Monthly maximum temperatures took a slight dip in the ‘90s but climbed in the ‘00s.

I began to see the conjoined conspiracies around global warming and rate-rationed water.  Memes didn’t spread that easily before the Internet, but these two ideas were suddenly everywhere.  That took a lot of money and clout in ‘86.  The movement to tax carbon was noisy and controversial; imposing water-rationing rates was quiet and rarely noticed.  Water rationing provided the proof of “global warming,” which became “climate change” after 2000, because dryness creates weather extremes, fires, and floods.

Some very rich investor wanted to rev up wind and solar power and started the ball rolling in 1986.

 

Speech to the Josephine County Commissioners, 8-11-2021, and the Grants Pass City Council, 8-18-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

Like Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

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