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

We need sprinklers to make rain in summer

I came to Grants Pass in the fall of 1984. Water and sewer utility bills had $25 for base rates: $20 for water; $5 for sewer. Units were literally pennies on the dollar. Come July and August, our utility bill rose to just over $26. We had thunderstorms nearly every weekend in the summer of 1985. 

I love thunderstorms, but I wondered: “Why only on weekends?” If it looked like rain and I didn’t water, it did not rain enough to make a difference. A Grants Pass gardening superstition was born; “If it looks like rain, and you don’t water, it won’t rain worth a darn.” 

Sixteen years later, in Landscape Management class, I learned that most residents of Grants Pass didn’t have automatic sprinklers and watered only on the weekends. Our teacher also told us, “Sprinklers evaporate half of what they throw before it hits the ground--and evaporation is waste.” 

But evaporation is not waste; it is the first step in the water cycle: evaporation; condensation; precipitation. Without enough sprinkler evaporation and transpiring plants, we get no rain in summer; the last three years excepted because Hunga Tonga threw 150 million tons of seawater into the stratosphere on January 15th, 2022. It’s still coming down. 

11/5/25 

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

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

A Proposed Charter Amendment: Utility Bills; Principles of Rate Setting; and Contingency Funds.

 

Our "falling apart" water treatment plant, about two blocks from the place we will be building a new one this year because of lack of maintenance early in the rationing-rate system.

Section 1. UTILITY BILLS: Only water and sewer charges shall be on City of Grants Pass utility bills.  Failure to pay City Utility Bills shall be the only reason to shut off water except for infrastructure maintenance, ordinances to the contrary notwithstanding.

      

Section 2.  PRINCIPLES OF RATESETTING:

 

A.    Monthly base rates for water shall pay all overhead, expenses that do not rise and fall with the volume of cleaned water produced.  Base Rates shall be based proportionally on water service size, per connection.  Base rates shall rise by actual inflation of the previous year’s overhead costs over the year before.

 

B.     A single unit rate for water shall pay for all unit costs, which rise and fall with the volume of cleaned water produced.  Water unit rates shall be total unit cost the previous year, divided by the number of total units produced the previous year.

 

C.     Base rates shall cover all sewage treatment costs, with rates to be based proportionally on sewer service size, per connection.  Sewer base rates shall rise by actual inflation of sewer costs in the previous year over the year before.

 

D.    Bulk water haulers shall pay the ¾ inch base rate per month, plus the city’s unit rate times 1.336 per 1000 gallons, to make all unit rates equal per gallon.

 

Section 3.  CONTINGENCY FUNDS

A.    Overhead and unit cost expenses shall include separate contingency funds to cover actual inflation of expenses during the year for each utility.

 

B.     There shall be a separate contingency fund for maintenance of infrastructure for each utility.

 

-end-

 

 

 

 

Talk or write to your Mayor and City Councilors

About putting this proposed Charter Amendment on a special election ballot ASAP.

 

Mayor Clint Scherf                                                      541-450-6000              cscherf@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Rob Pell                    Ward 1 NW                451-476-7578              rpell@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Indra Nicholas           Ward 1 NW                541-450-6000             inicholas@grantspassoregon.gov           

Councilor Rick Riker                  Ward 2 NE                 541-479-7333              rriker@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Victoria Marshall      Ward 2 NE                 541-450-6000              vmarshall@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Eric Schoegl               Ward 3 SE                  541-450-6000              eschoegl@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Seth Benham            Ward 3 SE                  541-450-6000              sbenham@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Joel King                    Ward 4 SW                541-761-7538              jking@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Councilor Kathleen Krohn         Ward 4 SW                541-450-6000              kkrohn@grantspassoregon.gov

 

Mayor and Council@grantspassoregon.gov

 

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

We can fix our water and sewer rates!

 

We can fix our water and sewer rates!

Water should never be rationed by price.  Every household should be able to afford to water their yard, protecting their city from fire, as it was before water-rationing rates.  Every household should pay the same charge for sewer within their water service size class, as it was before water-rationing sewer rates. 

·        No unit rates on sewer; minimal unit rates on water.

·        All water overhead paid through monthly base rates to pay monthly utility expenses.

·        Water unit costs covered by a single unit price.

·        All sewer costs equally shared through base rates, no extra charges.

·        Rates to rise by inflation of actual utility costs, not the Consumer Price Index (CPI).

·        No franchise fees.  The City cannot charge a franchise fee for a business it owns.

 

We can do this by putting a city initiative on the ballot, creating a Ratepayer Utility Rate Board for Grants Pass, passing it, and electing its members after it passes.

·        Rates will be set by an elected 5-member Ratepayer Utility Rate Board (Ratepayer Board)

·        Ratepayer Board eligibility is open to any registered voter living in a residence that uses Grants Pass water and/or sewer and who does not work for the city in any other capacity. 

·        Each member of the Ratepayer Board shall take an oath to stick to the above financial principles in setting utility rates. 

·        Each meeting of the Ratepayer Board will begin with a statement of these principles.

·        The Ratepayer Board will meet 5 business days within one week per year to set the rates and shall be compensated $100 per day for their attendance.

·        The City Manager shall provide each member of the Ratepayer Board with the previous year’s expenses of the water and sewer systems, including the Ratepayer Board’s per diem, one week before Ratepayer Board meetings begin.

 

Before we can do any of this, we need: a group to help write the petition; people to circulate the petition for the ballot; and people willing to serve on the Ratepayer Board.  All of this will be quicker and easier with money, so please donate.  We could use a website, too.  All of this must come together before we can even start to circulate a petition.  Fortunately, we get 2 years after the petition is approved to circulate to finish.  Let us know if you are interested in helping.

           541-955-9040                                        rycke@gardener.com

&&&&&&&&&&&&&& 2nd page &&&&&&&&&&&&&&&

Rationing rates have relatively low base rates and high unit rates, designed to cause less use of a product or service.  They give us cheap access to water and sewer service and make us pay through the nose to use it.  Worse yet, as use keeps dropping, rates are hiked by more than inflation every year to cover overhead in a very high-overhead business.   Overhead is the cost of the whole water or sewer system, bills that must be paid monthly regardless of use: debt payments; salaries; maintenance budgets; electricity for lights and computers.  Unit costs rise and fall with use of the utility, like water-cleaning supplies and power for pumping.  (Sewer will have no unit price.)

 

Grants Pass has had water-rationing rates since the 1990s but got serious about it in 2006 with much higher tiered unit rates and a lower base rate.  Water use dropped a lot. In 2008, City staff told the Council that their conservation rates had worked so well that the water plant could not pay the overhead.  Staff asked the council to raise the base rate by $3, which they said would stabilize revenues.  Council passed the base rate raise but it didn’t stabilize revenues because the unit rates were too high; the base rate was too low; so people kept cutting back on use.  After that, Grants Pass raised base and unit rates by the same percentage yearly to pay the overhead, until the City Council dedicated $3 million in America Rescue Act money to the new water plant and cancelled the last 2 yearly raises in rates for the new plant to compensate ratepayers.  But they are still raising rates by the CPI and will likely raise them to cover overhead every year.

The city started rationing rates on sewer in 2013, basing sewer units on the average of each winter month’s water use.  Sewer unit rates are especially bad for ratepayers and the sewer system because unit costs of cleaning sewage are much higher than for water.  They are particularly hard on the poor who must live many to a house and put a lot of water down the sewer.  When people cut back on water use by reducing what goes down their drains, they cut the water needed to make sewage flow smoothly.  Since sewage unit rates began, we have had sewage pumps clogging.  This is why we didn’t charge for sewer units before, and Medford and Portland still don’t.

 

When revenues don’t meet overhead expenses, maintenance is the easiest expense to cut.  Grants Pass never budgets what is recommended for replacement of pipes.  We had rationing rates for at least 20 years before we were told that our 80-year-old water plant is falling apart and we need a new one.  Electricity and natural gas utilities started rationing utility rates in the ‘70s, which is why we have had forest fires and gas leaks started by poor maintenance of power and gas lines.

 

Water-rationing rates have spread to cities around the world, making weather more variable and temperatures more extreme worldwide, causing bigger fires closer to cities, sometimes burning right through them, due to lower humidity from much less irrigation.  It’s time to start the Great Ratepayers Revolt by taking control of our city utility rates.

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

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

Give us a real break

 

New Water Treatment Plant site, cleaned for construction.

            Council decided to give the New Water Treatment Plant Project three million dollars of our ARPA funding for a down payment on our new water plant.  You also plan to give ratepayers a small break on our rates in return.  

At first, the City and The Daily Courier said that the City would cancel the last two years of base rate raises that are supposed to help pay the loan.  But they also said that the unit rate raises for the new plant would continue, as well as inflation and raising the separate new plant debt payment fee.  Lately, Courier articles and City staff have become less specific about which rates would be curtailed.

If you stop increasing base rates, but keep increasing unit rates, as unit rates rise, ratepayers will collectively cut back further on water use, decreasing revenue.  This will make the City raise unit and base rates to cover the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water plant, clawing back our expected $8 savings on the base rate.  Or the City might dip into the ARPA $3,000,000 to cover it, decreasing our future down payment and increasing our interest.

If you stopped the new plant unit rate raises instead of base rates, we would be paying more from base rates and no more for our use, and our rates might stabilize. 

When you passed the new plant payment fee, we were told that it would not rise by inflation and would go away when the debt was paid.

We were not told then that the fee would not cover the whole loan.  Twenty-two percent of eighty million dollars is being put on our base and unit rates, increasing by 5.28%, plus inflation, yearly for five years, will never go away, and will rise by inflation, every year until this rationing rate system is reformed.

You, our Council, can set base rates to cover all overhead: debt payments; operations; administration; maintenance; and actual inflation of plant costs.  You can lower all unit rates to one rate, paying for only unit costs, which rise and fall with our water use.  This was the way we paid for our plant and the cost of producing and delivering clean water with it, for over fifty years.  Grants Pass was watered; rates were low and stable.  To return to that rate system would be a real and permanent improvement in our health, wealth, safety, and happiness.     

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 12-1-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners, 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

Some People Can’t See the Good

 

         

Dear Editor,

             The Daily Courier published an article 11-17-2021, “IV Water District makes plea for state help," regarding the problems caused by illegal pot growing operations disguised as hemp farms.  One of the complaints in the article is that some of these farms are buying bulk water from Cave Junction's station.  Some people just don't know a good thing when they see it.

            City bulk water is legal to buy for all uses.  Cave Junction’s bulk rates are $30/1000 gallons.  Ratepayers of Cave Junction pay a top-tier rate of $2.05/100 cubic feet, or $2.74/1000g, for water delivered to their taps by pipelines. 

Everyone who buys bulk water at $30/1000g is paying some of the overhead that city ratepayers are not paying as they cut back on irrigation and other water use to pay high unit rates.  Bulk water users keep ratepayers’ unit and base rates from climbing still higher to pay the overhead, the monthly cost of having a water system, as they keep cutting back on use. 

This is what modern city rate systems do, rationing water by price, with a base rate too low to cover the overhead and high unit rates to discourage use.  But the City thereby depends on high unit rates to cover the overhead, which leaves it always chasing the overhead.  

Businesses can’t survive this way.  But water and sewer plants can; they are natural monopolies.  But they don’t have to; the Council could set base rates to cover all overhead and stop rationing water by rates.

 

Sincerely,

 

Rycke Brown

A pond drains my yard; a willow shades it

 

            We moved to Grants Pass in 1999 and bought a house on Bridge Street in October.  The first winter, our backyard flooded with water.  In the lowest point of our backyard, I dug a small pond to capture the water and pump it out to the street.  I eventually lined it with rubber and then rocks and made a watercourse and fall on the mound of dirt from the pond, lined and covered with rock.  I put a pump in the pond and laid irrigation line to send excess water to the street and added a line to the top of the watercourse, so I could flip switches to change it from pumping out, to recirculating, and back.

          The next spring, I stuck a twisty willow twig in the ground on the other side of the mound.  It grew fast and well, to about fifty feet tall and wide in about ten years.  Its girth is now one hundred eleven inches at three feet.  For a twisty willow, it is very strong and has not lost major branches in snowstorms like some have. 

The shade from that tree covers most of our backyard near the house after one o’clock PM and allows my grandkids to play on a little swing set and swim in an above-ground pool on hot days. It is vital to our use of our backyard.

          Two years ago, I wanted to redo the pond liner and we took the rocks and liner out and reshaped it a bit.  Last winter, it refilled and stayed filled, despite the dry spring.  I decided that twenty years of water in it had compacted the soil sufficiently to leave out the liner and just replace the rocks. 

This summer, the ground within six feet of the pond on the opposite side from the willow stayed moist but still firm underfoot, and our roses within that damp zone were happier than they had ever been.  The willow apparently sucked water only from the soil and the pond on its side.  It had no die-back and dropped far fewer twigs and leaves over this summer.

On the other hand, this magnificent tree has become expensive over the years and especially this year as it sucks as much water as it needs, because of the high and rapidly rising price of city water by the unit. 

This is another reason why we should not conserve water by rationing through high unit rates.

 

Speech to the Grants Pass City Council, 11-4-2021, shared with the Josephine County Commissioners,

 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

Asking public servants to ignore the law

Yesterday, I got a call from a person who was totally frustrated with the way the City Council doesn’t listen to her and her neighbors when asked to not allow the Sobering Center and now Foundry Village to be built in their neighborhood. She was also upset that the public were told to not speak about the very reason they were at the meeting, not wanting drunks and homeless people in their neighborhood. She was saying that they never listen, so why should she complain about our water and sewer rates?

Land use hearings always have specific criteria that one can speak to, and outside of that, they cannot rule. They give the rules in the introduction and the applicable criteria in the presentation. That you don’t like the kind of people that use a service in your neighborhood isn’t allowed in the criteria.

Last night, there was a delegation of 8-10 people with a couple of speakers who implored the City and Council to enforce the city code against camping in parks, so regular taxpayers can enjoy them. Several Councilors explained that their hands were tied by state and federal law as well as a court order to allow nightly camping in all parks but the All-Sports Park and are not allowed to evict campers for violations of code or camping rules without 72-hour notice. The city is being sued for criminalizing homelessness with camping bans.

You want the Council to listen to you? Don’t ask them to ignore the law. On the few occasions when they have listened to people who didn’t want certain people in their neighborhood, they have been overruled by the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).

In the case of campers in the parks, if the City ignores the court, it will be found in contempt of court and likely lose their case. We will probably have to put up with campers in our parks until the city builds sufficient shelters to meet their need.

One Councilor keeps pointing out that little houses, small pallet shelter campgrounds and a warming center will not meet the need and not get campers out of our parks. All of them will also have restrictions on who can use such shelter beyond being peaceful and law-abiding, because they are limited and people in the neighborhood don’t want those without shelter lining up early to get in.

What can meet the need is a couple of large hostels, cheap places to shower and sleep for $5-$10 per night, one for families and one for adults only, to keep kids separated from sex offenders. Think of a building like a grocery store with a large open space where there would be hundreds of cots, 6 feet apart, surrounded by: bathrooms; showers; lockers; a dog kennels; a meeting rooms for classes; a reading/dining room; and a parking lot planted with fruits and vegetables in planting strips, all fenced for use only by its customers. No food service, and few rules: be quiet and peaceful; don’t show anyone your guns or drugs; don’t litter or make a mess around one’s bed. Violators could be temporarily or permanently trespassed or made to pick up litter for minor infractions.

When it comes to asking the Council to reform our water rates to pay all the overhead with base rates and only marginal unit costs with unit rates, they have the power to do so. There is nothing in state or federal law that requires water-rationing rates.

You can ask by email, phone calls, writing on the city Facebook page, in person when you meet them, or a 3-minute comment at City Council meetings, first and third Wednesdays at 6:00. Control your anger; don’t attack them; and speak nicely if you want to influence them. They are public servants, but they are not only your servants. Don’t expect instant action; they need a lot of people contacting them frequently to be convinced to change a rate system that has been in place for over 20 years and to buck what has been instituted in cities around the world over the last 35 years.

Join Friends of the Restwell Center to support hostels and fill out your City survey to support use of ARPA funds to build them. It’s due October 22nd. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1681019735495611

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook and contact the council about water and sewer rates every month.