On High Water Bills ...

The highest charges on your Water & Sewer bill are probably the “Service” fees. Everyone pays the same amount here, no matter how low their consumption. Fixing our water and sewer infrastructure is the only way to drive down these fixed “Service” costs.

All municipalities in the Region pay the same rate for purchasing water and treating sewage. The rates you are charged for these services are almost double what the Region charges the City. This reflects what it costs the City to run the system.

The City’s costs include:

• buying treated water, from the Region, that is lost before it ever reaches the consumer
  BUT STILL HAS TO BE PAID FOR
• paying the Region TO UNNECESSARILY TREAT RAINWATER at the sewage treatment plant
  

The older sections of Niagara Falls still have many “combined sewers.” This means there is one pipe under the street that collects both sanitary sewage AND the storm water off the roads. When it rains, the rainwater is sent, along with any sanitary sewage, to the Region’s Stanley Avenue Waste Treatment plant. The cost of treating this rainwater is passed on to you.

Costs could be greatly reduced by separating the sewers into separate sanitary and storm systems.

30-40% of our streets still have these “combined sewers.”

The cost of separating all these combined sewers is in the neighbourhood of $100,000,000. This is a lot of money, but we have to do the work anyhow: The City is under orders, from the Ministry of the Environment (MOE), to separate the combined sewers.

Currently, only about $2 million per year is being allocated to sewer separation. This is the bare minimum the MOE will permit. While the bulk of this work remains undone, costs will continue to be high, and the fixed charges on your Water and Sewer bills will remain high.

A Special City Council Meeting on the Water Bill issue was held in September 2001, just two days before the decision was made to spend $17 million of taxpayers’ money on acquiring the CN/CP Railway Land Corridor.

After hearing from residents frustrated with their high Water & Sewer bills, and realizing that these bills are unnecessarily high because of the problems with our infrastructure, Ald. Kim Craitor and I made a motion that fixing the infrastructure be made our number one priority.

Our motion was defeated when the Mayor cast a negative vote to tie the vote. (When a Council vote is tied on a motion, the motion is lost.) Nonetheless, I continue to believe that fixing our infrastructure to bring costs down should be a priority for City Council.