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Letter to the editor

Water bills may bump up

The county seeks two increases of about 3 percent each to go into effect next year.

By THERESA BLACKWELL, Times Staff Writer
Published December 4, 2007

Pinellas County Utilities is seeking water rate increases of nearly 3 percent this year and another 3 percent next year.

County commissioners are scheduled to vote on the rate increases after a public hearing on Dec. 18.

If commissioners approve the increases, county utilities customers now paying $4.04 for a thousand gallons of water would pay $4.16 for the same amount of water. The new rate would appear on bills received after Feb. 18, 2008.

Then in October 2008, the rate would rise to $4.28 per thousand gallons of water, another increase approaching 3 percent. The rates would affect customers who buy water directly from the county.

It could be worse - and has been. For the past five years, the county's rates for a thousand gallons of water went up 12 to 13 percent each year.

Those increases followed the creation of Tampa Bay Water, which raised the rates it charged its members, including Pinellas County, to pay for well-field acquisition and water facilities.

The latest proposed increases are partly to meet the rising cost of maintaining facilities, said county Utilities Director Pick Talley. Mostly, though, they would help pay for a planned new water-blending plant in North Pinellas.

About a quarter of the increase would go toward the cost of running and replacing infrastructure.

"There is the normal escalation of all the costs that all businesses are faced with: power, labor, fuel, chemicals and pipe replacement," Talley said.

Like painting San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, he said, renewing the infrastructure of a utility system never ends. "You continuously renew the parts of your utility system as they reach their life expectancy," he said.

And that gets more expensive each year.

The rest of the proposed rate increase would cover $75-million of the $85-million that utilities officials estimate they will need for the water-blending plant, now planned to be built in the northern end of the Brooker Creek Preserve. The remaining $10-million will come from the utilities capital improvement fund.

Construction of the blending plant is stalled for now. Before it proceeds, county commissioners must approve a contract for an engineering consultant to make final revisions to current plans.

Talley hopes the commission will approve that contract on Dec. 18. When the design is complete, the project can go out for bid. Talley would like to do that as soon as possible, while the local construction market is competitive.

He expects the commission will approve the water rate increases.

"If they want to continue with the program that they've previously approved," he said, "then we need to have a rate increase."

Talley said utilities would borrow the $75-million needed for the blending plant on the municipal bond market and use the money from increased water rates to pay off the bonds over 30 years.

So rates would go down again once the bonds were paid off?

"Probably not," Talley said.

If you go

Proposed hikes

Cost per 1,000 gallons of water for Pinellas County water customers

Current: $4.04

Proposed: $4.16 (for bills received after Feb. 18, 2008)

Proposed next year: $4.28 (as of October 2008)

The Pinellas County Commission will meet at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 18 in the fifth floor assembly room, 315 Court St., Clearwater, to take public comments on its proposed water rate increases. For information on the increases, call the Utilities Department at (727) 464-4000.

[Last modified December 3, 2007, 20:55:37]