A half-dozen residents of Cortez sharply criticized new water rates in the city during Tuesday’s meeting of the city council.
Joy Bullock said she apparently has one of the largest water bills in the city, and that her most recent bill was $824 for one month, although she had cut her water use by 25 percent. “They have checked and they say we do not have a leak,” she said.
Anna Pedersen said people in her neighborhood take pride in their homes and property, but the rate hike will force many people not to maintain their yards. “I fear we will become a community of skeletal trees, of dirt and weeds,” she said.
Charlie Williamson said the city’s goal seemed to get “to just get ride of yards period and go to, I call it ‘dryscaping’.” He said if he had no lawn, “The park would be the only place we get to go play with our grandkids.”
Several of the people commenting said Cortez has many retirees living on fixed incomes who can’t afford the cost of tearing out lawns and replacing them with xeriscaping.
Cortez raised its water rates this year after it had a water-rate study done by an engineering firm.
Director of Public Works Brian Peckins told KSJD the study recommended the city raise its rates from $26.50 for the first 1,000 gallons used in a month (the minimum monthly fee) for single-family residents, to at least $48.50. The city instead upped the rate to $31.80 for the first 1,000 gallons.
The rates are now tiered, with the rates per 1,000 gallons increasing for people who use more water. The highest rate is for people who use more than 24,000 gallons per month.
For many of the 2,000 residential water accounts, Peckins said, the rate increase would not add much to their bills. For an average home using 8,000 gallons a month, the increase means an additional $5 to $10, he said.
“But we have people using over 75,000 gallons. There are close to 250 people using over 24,000 gallons.”
He said 11 percent of single-family residences used almost one-third of the city’s water consumption. “That’s a lot of water going onto our lawns. We’re trying to wean people off Kentucky bluegrass, which is very water-thirsty, and replace it with more native grasses such as blue grama or buffalo grass.”
The city offers a turf-replacement program to help with the cost of removing lawns and xeriscaping them.
The city uses irrigation water in its parks system, but unfortunately the infrastructure doesn’t exist to allow people to use it on their lawns, he said. “We would have to put in water lines.”
The city is working to replace some of its own non-functioning turf, Peckins said – not in the parks, but in medians such as those on Montezuma Avenue.
“We’ve had two pretty good snowpack years,” Peckins said, “but we’re a drought away from water rationing. We’re trying our best to promote water conservation.”
Mayor Rachel Medina told the audience Tuesday that the goal of the rate increase was to encourage conservation and to help bring in money to replace severely aging infrastructure.
Peckins told KSJD the city has 129,000 linear feet of old cast-iron pipe put in from 1950 to 1976 that needs to be replaced. He said a ballpark estimate of the cost is $80 million.
That effort requires a great deal of coordination with paving and sewer-replacement efforts. “We don’t want to replace the streets and come back a year later to tear up and replace water lines,” he said.
Peckins said the city has set up a water-line replacement team that will work to find equipment and hire people to try to do some of the replacement in-house. “We can save a bit of money and make a little dent in it,” he said. “It’s a long-term project.”
The city’s Water Division is funded by fees, not by the city’s general fund.
In addition to the old water lines, the city’s water-treatment plant will need replacing in a decade or two, which will cost another $80 million or more, Peckins said. “It’s an old plant and we need to upgrade it, maintain it and keep it running.”
Peckins said such issues are a problem nationwide and that people are generally not paying the true cost of drinking water.
“Cities are going to have to replace water plants and water lines. People are getting subsidized water – not paying the true cost of water.”
And even as populations increase, the total amount of drinking water does not, he said. “The supply stays the same. Water is going to become scarcer and more expensive.”
The Public Works Department and city have a water action plan and are inputting data to predict the growth capacity for Cortez. “Can we support 10,000, 20,000 or 30,000 people? We’re looking to come up with that answer.”
In the meantime, to help ease the “sticker shock” of people’s summertime water bills, city officials are looking at fixed-rate billing.
“ In the wintertime, water use is much lower in the city,” Peckins said. “With fixed-rate billing, instead of $30 in the winter and $150 in the summer, people would be somewhere in the middle. We’re looking at that.”
At Tuesday’s meeting, Medina and City Manager Drew Sanders stressed the need for conservation, but also said they were concerned about the reports of the high water bills and the city will look further into the matter.
