SEWER OVERCHARGE REBATE
A couple of years ago, it came to light that the Region had been inadvertently overcharging City of Niagara Falls water account holders. Instruments that the Region believed were calibrated in US gallons were actually calibrated in Imperial gallons, which are smaller. The Region was charging for US gallon usage when it was actually Imperial gallons being used.
I was consistent in voting to apply the $5.4 million in sewer overcharges to be rebated from the Region to the City to city-wide sewer infrastructure improvements. I did not support rebating monies to water account holders because this would not be fair, wise or efficient.
Water account holders were not being offered a rebate of the actual amount they overpaid. Instead, they were offered an “average” amount – under which some people received more money back that they had actually overpaid, while others received much less than they had overpaid and were, in effect, subsidizing those who received more than they were owed. I could not support such an unfair situation.
The rebate approach was also unfair to many who rent their homes. The costs of providing water and sewer service are calculated into the rents that many tenants pay their landlords. A rebate put money into the hands of the landlords, but did any pass their windfall on to their tenants in the form of rent rebates or reductions? Investing all of the monies returned by the Region into the infrastructure would have resulted in much more equitable treatment for ALL residents.
Industrial, Commercial and Tourist Commercial users, as well as residents, were overcharged. These heavy users are charged at a higher rate than residential users because usage rates are based on the size of the users' connecting pipes. (Residential connections use a smaller diameter and therefore are charged a lower rate.) 10% of the 30,000 Niagara Falls water account holders thus pay 40% of the charges. Most of the money overpaid came out of the Tourist Commercial sector, and most of the rebates flowed back into the pockets of these large commercial account holders – such as hotels. Many believe that the tourism sector should pay more towards the upkeep of our infrastructure – here was a golden opportunity for monies from that sector to be used toward infrastructure work which would benefit the entire community.
Putting the money the Region was rebating back to the City into infrastructure repairs and improvements would have saved us all much more money in the long run. We would have been able to pay less for our water since we would be paying for less treated water bought from the Region but lost through leaky water mains. We would have had to pay the Region less for our sewer costs because, if more sewers were separated, we would be sending less rainwater (from combined sewers) to the sewage treatment plant. The latter is work we CANNOT escape: The City is under orders from the Ministry of the Environment to separate our combined sewers. We still have to pay to do this work, but the later it is done, the more we will have all paid in the interim to treat clean rainwater as if it were sewage. What didn't get put towards that work will still have to be paid for later.
The people demanding a rebate failed to realize or appreciate that we wasted a lot of money to get that rebate to them in an approximate range (not the exact amount) of what they had been overcharged. A sizable chunk of the money the City received from the Region was frittered away on the administrative costs entailed in calculating and administering the rebates, rather than using ALL of the money (without frittering any of it away doing individual calculations on over half a million invoices) to get necessary jobs done.
Sewers Overcharge Refund | Millennium Trail | Downtown Revitalization | Past Issues | 
