Fair Water

The April All Point Bulletin has brought us the new developments in troublesome trash collection and wandering water access. To remind: the current trash licensee says he can’t pick up recycling at the current rates and the county says he has to pickup recycling. Last month the County had provided mediation between the licensee and some local people unhappy with the situation. This month, the state decided it wanted to run things. So the state commission is now ‘conducting discovery’ and the county guy says maybe by fall there will be some decisions. I know that a lot of people have strong feelings about this, but it can't be the hardest issue in governance that the county or state has ever faced. But, if this is the way things go here, we can surely be more appreciative of why the trash isn’t picked up in Baghdad (or probably in Kabul) either.

The water problem is decided of course. There wasn’t enough water so they spent 18 months or so figuring out how to get more water (building a new storage tank) and how to raise the water rates to pay for the new tank. Then somebody decided there was an error in the planning somewhere and there was plenty of water without a new storage tank, and why not just keep the new water rate prices because there was some maintenance (replacing the pipes) that needed to be done anyway.

But there are people unhappy with the new rates and unclear why they are still there given the disappearance of the water storage tank needs and the likelihood that a new storage tank and new pipes are not interchangeable projects from a financial perspective. But what people got into the newspaper about was not so much that as that the water rates are ‘unfair.’ The headline is “WATER RATES DESCRIBED AS UNFAIR.’ I like that journalistic objectivity. They may be, they may not be: we’re just reporting what is said.

But, it is really hard to know what, exactly would constitute a fair water rate. Fairness is a tricky concept and I seem to have spent most of my life hearing people telling me about one thing or another that “life is not fair.” So if life is not fair, why would we be thinking that it mattered whether the water rates were unfair?

Nevertheless, this concern caused me to spend the last few days trying to figure out what a just water rate would be, since I have no idea what a fair rate would be (other than one that the unhappy people are willing to pay, which is more about economic ideas than about philosophical ones). The major issues here are that lots of people (mostly Canadians) don’t use any water most of the year because they aren’t here. But they don’t disconnect their water service because getting a meter connected now costs something like $7,500. So they don’t use water but they pay for the water they don’t use. A second concern is that some people use more water than others, even among those who are equally present at any moment, because there are more people in the household, for example. These people think/feel that the base allotment ought to provide more water. That is, it should be enough water for a family of four rather than for a family of two. Unfortunately, what that amount would be is not entirely clear. What you do get is almost 4,000 gallons every two months for $53.

My only real conclusion though is that we should be thinking about two rates: the first one would be the cost of just having a faucet in your house, whether you use water or not. That cost everyone ought to pay equally. If that amount were separated from the use-of-water rate, there’d be less to argue about. And water might not seem so expensive. The way the water bill looks leads consumers to think that they’re just paying for water. But they’re also paying for having a water system. Two things: water system and water. More transparency would help.