Water rates increase, no action taken on sewer rates

The price of water is going up in Plano.

Thanks to a rate increase by the North Texas Municipal Water District, water and sewer rates will increase in Plano. The increase is mainly due to the costs associated with a $300 million pipeline that will be constructed from Lake Texoma to the district's water treatment plant in Wylie, a necessary addition because of the presence of zebra mussels in Texoma.

As a result of the rate increase, the city is increasing the water rate it charges it customers by 10 percent. While the NTMWD has told the city that wastewater treatment costs have increased by 2 percent, no decision has been made on how much the city will increase the sewer rate, said Mark Israelson, the city's director of policy and governmental relations.

The sewer rate is not being adjusted at this time because the city staff feels the numbers used by the water district to calculate the projected usage for the 2012-13 year may be faulty, Israelson told the city council Monday night. The district initially estimated the city would produce 9.6 billion gallons of wastewater this year, but a re-estimation mid-year took that number to 10.3 billion, a number Israelson said he doesn't feel the city will reach.

"It further gets complicated because the projected budget for next year is based on the re-estimate," he said. "So when they re-estimated us up from the original budget, it had a compounding effect, not only on the re-estimate, but on next year's budget as well.

"That original budget projection is more than likely where we are going to end, versus what they had re-estimated. I think they re-estimated early in the season, early in the process, and they artificially projected that a little bit higher then where we are actually going to come in."

The amount of wastewater produced by Plano, as a percentage of the whole, has been dropping each year, Israelson said. The city produced 37 percent of the wastewater during the 2007-08 budget year, a number that dropped 35 percent last year.

However, during the water district's re-estimation, that number jumped from a projected 34 percent to 37 percent, something Israelson said was unlikely to actually occur.

"That is because the neighbors that we have that are part of the NTMWD and are fast growing are adding population and are adding sewer flow to the system," he said. "While [our flow] has stayed fairly consistent, their's has grown over time."

Israelson said it would be wise for the city to hold off on increasing the sewer rate until early next year when the final numbers for the 2011-12 budget cycle will be in, and the city will also know how much sewage it used during the first quarter of 2012-13. This will prevent the city for asking for more money from its residents than it actually needs, he said.

City Manager Bruce Glasscock agreed, suggesting the city council only raise the water rates at the current time.

"We think this is the prudent way and will minimize the impact on our residents," Glasscock said to the council.

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