Tonight's the night for final public input (6 p.m. - Ogden City Council Chambers) on the water rate revision proposals which we've been discussing here on Weber County Forum for the past several months. Check out tonight's full council packet here:
Despite relatively robust and well-reasoned public objections to the current proposals, which if enacted would essentially ignore water conservation and even reward those water users who use the greatest volumes of water with volume use discounts, as well as unfairly penalize those Ogden rate payers who have the benefit of secondary water and thereby reduce the demands on the Ogden water supply system, the council seems hell bent to blindly ram this plan down our throats. For the benefit of those who might attend tonight's meeting to lodge their final protests, we provide our chief objections below in summary form:
- Ogden's water and sewer rates are already high by Utah standards
- One reason for Ogden's high rates is the massive interest payments on the utilities' bonded debt. Under the current proposal, the utilities would take on even more debt and the interest payments would rise further.
- Another reason for Ogden's high rates is because the city has been using the utilities to subsidize other city operations. This subsidy is proposed to keep growing along with utility rates.
- The proposed water rate increase is higher than even the consultants say is necessary.
- The proposed rate structure would shift more of the costs from those who use more water to those who use less.
- Sewer rates are proposed to go down by a few percent on average, but most of the benefit of this reduction would go to a subset of commercial customers (see page 29).
Speak up today, Ogden City Citizens... or forever hold your peace!
Keep your eyes on this article folks, as we anticipate that Dan Schroeder will be live blogging from the Council Chambers tonight, for which community minded effort we'll thank him in advance.
In the meantime, we'll dedicate our lower comments section to those WCF readers who'd like to offer their own remarks before, during or after tonight's regular council session.
Update 5/15/12 5:34 p.m.: Attention, everyone. Dan Schroeder is now live-blogging from the City Council Chambers. Click "comments" to monitor his real-time posts.
Update 5/15/12 9:32 p.m.: In one of Dan's real-time comments, he refers to a "slideshow," presented by Dan during the public comments segment of tonight's meeting. Having received this document by email and uploaded it to our WCF storage site, we're happy to provide the link:
Update 5/16/12 7:00 a.m.: The Standard-Examiner provides this morning's post-meeting Mitch Shaw story:
