Hats off to North Carolina residents, who, for almost a year now, have cut their water consumption by a third in response to a record drought.
Now, the residents of Charlotte-Mecklenburg County are getting a hefty reward for their sacrifice: they’ll be paying more for their water.
Perhaps ticked-off residents shouldn’t be surprised: less spending on water has left Charlotte with a projected $29 million shortfall over this year and next. Utilities officials say they must raise rates to make up for the losses.
Has Joe Citizen shot himself in the foot?
(Hat tip: Kip Robinson)
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Perhaps the Charlotte utilities officials should investigate more ways to become efficient with spending and reduce overhead to reward the residents of Charlotte who became more efficient consumers of water…
The unit charge for water in most municpalities includes both the cost of water and a contribution to the water department’s fixed charges. When less water is used, water costs go down, but fixed costs remain. The unit charge for water has to be increased to cover the deficit, but total customer bills are substantially lower even after the rate increase
Save water -> price of water rises -> need to save even more -> etc.
Is this circle vicious or virtuous?
Actually I wonder whether water was undervalued during the drought. Americans have become rather used to so many things being invisibly subsidized (oil exploration… road maintenance… food production… suburban infrastructure… ). Perhaps we aren’t suddenly being overcharged for these things, we’re being *appropriately* charged for them.
Isn’t this the same thing that happened in Southern California back in the late 80s early 90s? Voluntary reductions failed, so the utility raised rates. But it worked so well that income fell drastically, so rates were raised again?
Can anyone from CA back then confirm this? What eventually happened?
I sure hope there is more to the story than this.
With less use of the facilities, shouldn’t maintenance needs go down? Can’t they get by with less staff? Don’t the water treatment plants use less energy because they aren’t running as long?
Please clue us in. Why doesn’t the reduced consumption result in similar reduced costs to the city?
And are the officials still advising its unsafe to put bathwater onto your garden ? I hate to think what they’ll say when they find out people are putting ‘organic fertiliser’ on their vegetables…
I’m inclined to agree with Paul @3. And it was just announced that we can use grey water on our plants. Now we’ll all smell like Dove soap.
It’s complicated. If you treat, test and deliver X amount of water, your costs are X: however, processing 2X water does not cost 2X. It probably costs 1.1X. So when you cut water use dramatically, your costs-per-unit go up — often dramatically.
I looked at my water bill (not sewer, not garbage) recently. About 5% ($3) of the bill was for water. The rest was for having the service at all. I conserve water because it’s environmentally helpful, not because I can’t afford to spend $3 every month.
It’s hard to hit the right balance here. Do you charge a lot per unit to give people an incentive to conserve? Or do you charge a fixed cost for the essentially inflexible costs, and leave people thinking that water costs mere pennies each day, which means that they can “afford” to waste it?
Residents of Charlotte are seeing the downside to the first approach. Residents in many other places are seeing the downside (shortages) to the other approach. There’s no one-size-fits-all solution here.