Comment
Past due
It wasn’t idle curiosity, but neither was there a specific purpose to my request. In reading and writing about the County’s waterworks these past 13 years, and specifically about the escalating costs of keeping this system of pipes and pumps flowing smoothly, there was no obvious measure of how consumers were coping. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence about the pain inflicted by rising water bills, much of it from folks who go away for a couple of months and come back to a bill for water they didn’t use. But there is little hard data to indicate whether residents are straining under water bills that have more than doubled in a decade and are likely to continue to rise sharply.
I reached out the County’s new media and communication person with my question. Lisa McLennan had been helpful and prompt in our dealings. Furthermore I wasn’t entirely sure who could provide the answer I was looking for, or if anyone could.
Waterworks is a complicated business. Like other utilities such as electricity and gas, the waterworks performs an intricate juggling act, continuously matching supply and demand on a moment-to-moment basis. Outages can mean a major inconvenience to consumers— and sometimes worse.
Unlike other utilities, however, quality of the supply is paramount. So an immense effort must be put into testing and purifying water along the entire supply chain to ensure it is safe. Then the wastewater is treated and tested again so that it is safe to put back out into the environment. For these reasons, waterworks is a highly regulated business—requiring a vast amount of reporting and documentation.
There is, however, very little known about the waterworks consumer—and their ability to pay.
In Ontario, water utilities are required to pass along the full cost of the system—operations, maintenance, capital expenditures and financing costs—to the consumer through their water bill. None of this is supposed to spill onto the general taxpayer— who may not have a direct benefit from the waterworks system.
Since seven people were poisoned by their water supply in Walkerton in 2000— and many more made sick—waterworks utilities have added massive amounts of regulation and rigour to their operations to ensure this never happens again.
To do so, these utilities have spent millions upon millions upgrading, renewing and replacing this infrastructure. The cost goes directly to the consumer. As a result, rates have spiraled upward. In rural communities, water bills have risen far faster than incomes, so the cost of water is a much greater share of a monthly household budget than it was a decade ago.
What effect is that having on these households? We can conserve water—but only to a point.
I wanted to know how County waterworks customers were managing. So I asked McLennan for information on waterworks arrears. Were these customers struggling to pay their bills? What percentage? And were the number of late payers growing, shrinking or flat?
While incomplete, this would give a window into customer tolerance of rising rates—something that didn’t exist in any of the volumes of reports prepared by the utility.
I wasn’t hopeful. I’d not seen much data about waterworks customers. I expected to hear that it wasn’t tabulated and therefore wasn’t available. And in fairness, waterworks focus is on operations and quality rather than customer service and communication. Given the regulatory climate and financial constraints these folks work under, it is hard to quibble with their priorities.
Still, consumers tend to feel put upon when their bills become more burdensome every month—especially for water they didn’t use. For others, the impact is more dire. So it is important to understand how residents are coping. Particularly as a waterworks committee currently toils in meetings to hammer out a new—higher—rate structure.
A couple of days after making my request to McLennan, I received an answer from Amanda Carter in the County’s finance department. It was all there. And more. A tidy little table listing the number of users, total number in arrears and percentage for the years 2010 and 2015.
I had asked for a snapshot from those two years to see if there had been a significant change up or down. But I was a wee bit surprised to see that the percentage of waterworks customers with bills in arrears had declined. That begged the question: had I chosen the wrong years? Was this just a blip? So I asked Carter to look at the data again, in order to answer these questions. I had already received the information requested— it felt a bit ungrateful to ask for more digging.
Yet, not twenty minutes later a full set of data—from 2010 to 2015—arrived in my email. Plus an explanation. The finance department had put rigorous collection procedures in place in 2012, and this had had a positive effect in reducing arrears. As such, the number of water customers in arrears has fallen steadily from 15 per cent in 2010 to 12 per cent last year.
We will talk more about what these numbers mean on another day and there will be more questions to follow in the coming weeks and months—but for today I want to acknowledge the responsiveness, timeliness and helpfulness I regularly receive from the folks at Shire Hall.
Our job is to be critical and ask tough questions about how taxpayer dollars are spent and our interests protected. We will not waver in this pursuit. Yet it is also our job, too, to observe and note when and where the business of government succeeds and excels.
This was a good example of that.
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