The Santa Maria City Council voted 4-1 on April 21 to raise water and sewer rates 5 percent annually for the next three years. The increase goes with the flow set by the city over the past 30 years, which have seen annual rate hikes of 5 percent.
Starting on July 1, single-family households will have to pay an estimated $3.79 more per month. That works out to paying about 2 cents more per gallon.
For the rate area known as “southwest,” established when Newlove and McCoy Streets were annexed by the city, the increase will be 5 percent plus $1. The Department of Utilities staff report states that the extra money will pay for the “additional infrastructure costs to build out the system and deliver water to that area.”
Money from the rate increase will go toward maintenance of the city’s water and sewage systems, Director of Utilities Shad Springer said. That includes rehabilitating the concrete on worn manholes and paying for construction of percolation ponds and anaerobic digesters at the wastewater treatment plant.
The City Council received written protests from two utilities customers—10,874 were needed to deny the increase. Councilmember Etta Waterfield broke with her colleagues and voted against the hikes. She told the Sun she was concerned that the annual rate increases, which the City Council revisits every three years, have become normalized.
“We’re always going back to the taxpayer for more money,” she said. “If we did it every single year, we’d have more people in our council chambers saying, ‘No, no, no.’”
Still, water and sewer are relatively cheap in Santa Maria. The city’s monthly rate for water and sewer, which costs about $80 a month for single-family households, is the fifth-lowest of 19 Central Coast communities surveyed by city staff.
Santa Maria can enjoy relatively low water and sewer rates because it’s blessed with a generous groundwater basin. The city uses about 13,500 acre feet of water a year out of the ground—for perspective, the harbor in Sydney, Australia, holds roughly 30 times that volume. About 10,000 acre-feet of Santa Maria’s annual water use is pumped out of the ground.
The city of Solvang, which has the second-most expensive rates of the 19 surveyed, charges an average of more than $160 a month for water. City Manager Brad Vidro said that’s because Solvang forks over $3 million a year to purchase state water, which provides the city with about half of the water it uses.
This article appears in Apr 30 – May 7, 2015.
