Water view

As snow fills my walkway for the 11th time this month, I think about my friends and neighbours who have managed to escape to warmer locales during these more trying days in Prince Edward County. It’s not envy so much as it is a desire to share the warmth emanating from their Instagram pics from Palm Beach, Malaga or Havana. I am thinking of them, too, because they might be most interested in my topic this week.

Waterworks, I understand, has a limited audience. Leave aside the dullness of supplying water and taking it away as waste, it is a topic made narrower by the fact that only about a third of County homes are served by the municipal water utility.

But those homeowners are becoming increasingly frustrated about the cost and the quality of the service. Sadly, others have tallied up the rising costs of living in the County, weighed it against the increased value of their home and concluded they must live somewhere else.

Waterworks bills tend not to attract much attention, that is until you go away for a while. When you return, you find you owe $144.62 for two months of water and wastewater treatment, despite not having consumed or discharged a drop.

This is because the waterworks system runs whether you are here or not, or whether you turn on a tap or flush a toilet. As such, there are overhead costs that must be recovered. This isn’t a unique arrangement, however.

It is not as though you pay a fixed fee to the gas station each month. Instead, you pay for the amount you use and the base costs are built into the price at the pump. Even when you buy water at a store, the price is a mix of overhead and variable costs. Why isn’t it the same for the water utility?

What this means is that about 54 per cent of your water bill each month, is fixed. The remainder is based on how much you use. Most folks look at these odd proportions and ask: Shouldn’t actual water consumers pay a greater share? If I use more, shouldn’t I pay for it?

It’s not as though the municipality hasn’t tried to shift more of the waterworks costs onto consumers. But when they do, we use less water. Revenues fall and there isn’t enough to keep the pumps turning. We get distracted and muddle along.

So here we are—a system that neither promotes conservation nor properly accords costs to those who should pay them.

Is there a better way to run a water utility?

Waterworks customers pay 100 per cent of the cost of the system. All the expenses, all the capital and all the debt is the responsibility of the 4,444 waterworks customers in Prince Edward County. It is governed by County council, yet fewer than half of these folks have a stake in the utility. Their interests are not aligned with those who pay all the bills.

It is why we need an independent waterworks commission. We need a utility in which decisions are made by those who use it, fund it and depend on it.

Perhaps the most pressing reason to form an autonomous utility commission is so that we might begin to rein in the soaring costs. As the chart makes disturbingly clear, waterworks costs have exploded since 2000—from $1.3 million to almost $7.6 million last year. That’s a growth rate of 10 per cent per year since amalgamation.

It has had a massive impact. Had this business expanded at the cost of living over the past two decades, rather than paying nearly $7.6 million this year we would be paying instead about $1.9 million.

The utility has 4,444 accounts—or customers. Therefore, the average bill in 2018 was $1,687 rather than $421 had utility grown at the rate of inflation. Remember, too, that while there may be more homes in the serviced areas now than in 2000, there are fewer people sharing these costs.

Of course, the water crisis in Walkerton in 2000 changed things for all waterworks utilities in Ontario and beyond. More training, more testing and significantly higher regulatory compliance costs. Yet, the weight of these new measures should have been baked in five years later. But even when you use 2005 or 2006 as your baseline, expanding the utility at a rate equal to the cost of living would result in annual expense of $4.6 million in 2018—not the $7.6 million waterworks customers paid last year.

Walkerton doesn’t explain the escalating cost to operate the County’s waterworks. There are other factors— badly neglected pipes in Picton and a new sewage plant on a hill—but none satisfactorily explains an expansion of nearly four times in two decades.

We must find ways to contain the escalating costs in this utility. Another decade at this pace will see waterworks costs soar to $11.4 million.

There is enormous pressure on the waterworks utility to deliver safe and clean water and return it safely to the watershed. This is essential. There is little pressure, however, to spend prudently. To ensure good value for money.

This is the first objective of new waterworks utility.

rick@wellingtontimes.ca