CMUD Customers Soaked Again
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities Department could save everyone a whole lot of time and just concede that rates will increase every year for the foreseeable future, just like they have every year in the past.
Drought? Doesn’t matter, rates will go up. Floods and typhoons? Rates will go up. Picture perfect weather? Guess what, your rates are increasing.
And they are again, for about 94 percent of CMUD customers according to a proposed plan officials dumped on city council last night. This from WFAE:
The utilities department has spent a year reviewing water rates. The recommended changes include a new flat fee of about $6 a month that would be added to every customer bill.
“This additional fixed charge will be a big improvement in our stability,” utilities director Barry Gullet told the Charlotte City Council. “The vast majority of our costs in operating our utility are actually fixed costs. But nearly all of our revenue, currently, is variable revenue. It’s based on water and sewer sales.”
The new fee would mean higher water bills for about 94 percent of utilities customers. The other six percent are the largest water users in the system and they’d actually see their monthly bills drop by as much as $40 because of a change in how sewer rates would be charged. Gullet says those people have been paying for sewer services they aren’t actually using.
Nice to hear CMUD is abandoning its socialist water-pricing scheme that fostered class envy and did absolutely nothing to fix the department’s long-range capital deficiencies, which are an absolute wreck. The department is hundreds of millions of dollars under water, and it’s unlikely that any rate structure tweak could bridge the gap.
The proposed rate structure unveiled this week, which the council is expected to vote on Feb. 28, is ostensibly revenue neutral – meaning it’ll take in the same amount of total money as last year – but already CMUD officials are hinting that … wait for it … they’ll need to ask for a rate hike for the new fiscal year to help pay for capital projects.
Meanwhile, environmentalists are already squawking that the proposed rate structure will hurt conservation efforts by removing incentives to use less water. That’s a laughable canard considering the obscene amount of water CMUD loses each and every day because of pipe leaks and breaks on backlog to be fixed, with hundreds of gallons of water flowing into the abyss.
How do I know this? Because for the past two months we’ve had a veritable river flowing down our street from one of those leaks. CMUD’s response: hang tight; you’re on the list – of several hundred.
And now they’re telling us our utility rates are on the rise. Again.
Wonderful.
CMUD's river of conservation, one of hundreds of leaks on backlog to be fixed
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