Six community members shared the same grievance at the Cortez City Council on Tuesday night: High water rates.
Starting Jan. 1, the city raised the cost of water to conserve it and to bolster its enterprise fund, which pays for updating infrastructure.
“One of the biggest issues we have in our community is aging infrastructure, and we have not been collecting enough money to address all of our aging waterlines,” said Mayor Rachel Medina.
Already, Cortez has a water line replacement team that’s beginning to replace the roughly 30% of water lines around the city that date as far back as 1950.
But some folks in the community say the rates are too high.
“We can’t afford this,” said one community member at the July 9 meeting. “I’ve got a beautiful yard, but at this rate, I’m going to let it die.”
High water rates encourage – in addition to cutbacks around the house – xeriscaping, a type of landscaping that uses native plants in lieu of groomed, green lawns.
“What we’re really trying to do is to encourage residents to move away from water-needy Kentucky bluegrass to less thirsty water grasses,” said Brian Peckins, the city’s public works director.
The city uses, on average, four times the amount of water in the summer than in winter, he said.
“What that means is the residents are watering their lawns and they’re irrigating with treated city water,” Peckins said.
In May alone, roughly 18 Olympic-size swimming pools’ worth of treated city water went to keeping up lawns and landscaping, he said.
“Watering nonfunctional turf is just not sustainable,” Peckins said.
On May 1, the city launched its Turf Replacement Program to incentivize people to transition from their nonnative landscapes to more natural xeriscapes.
Property owners stand to earn $2 for every square foot of turf they dig up, said Ian Roberson, a water conservation specialist. They also can apply for funding to help minimize financial costs in making the switch.
“We live in the desert,” said Medina. “We can’t adopt East Coast landscapes. They either need to be willing to pay for it or understand that that’s not going to work here.”
In previous years, the city raised base water rates by 5%. This year, it’s up four times that amount – which is lower than what SEH Inc., the company that conducted a water study in Cortez last year, proposed.
SEH recommended the city double its rates.
Instead, the city settled on a 20% increase, which, on average, raised the base rate to $31.80, from its 2023 rate of $26.50, Peckins said.
From there, fees are tiered. The more water one uses, the higher their bill will be.
“We were targeting the high-water users, and that’s where we’re getting the complaints from now,” Peckins said.
For households that use close to the 2023 summertime average of 8,000 gallons per month, rate increases are negligible, having risen $10 at most, he said.
“Mine’s more like a $400 increase,” said one resident. “Something is not right.”
To this, Peckins guessed that a household with a water bill that’s nearly $800 is using close to 100,000 gallons of water per month, under these new rates. He said it’s a case they’ll investigate.
During public comment, another person explained how he had been out of town for 40 days. For the duration of that time, the water to his house was turned off, aside from the sprinkler system.
The water bill came, and it was $300.
“I understand that rate increases are necessary, but this structure seems punitive,” he said.
Drew Sanders, the city manager, said the move was in the name of conservation.
“The amount of water that is being used does need to decrease, but I’m also disappointed in some of these amounts,” Sanders said.
“We’ll look at it, and we’ll come back to council with it.”
Peckins said rates will remain the same unless the council changes them.
“It’s still a small group in the community that’s having these high bills,” said Medina. “We want to look at the data and make sure the tiered water rate study we got is accurate and that we made a good decision on the pricing.”
Otherwise, the tiered system in place – where rates increase as water use increases – is a good way to reduce consumption, she said.
“Populations are rising, and we’re not making any more water,” said Peckins. “The bottom line is that water is a precious resource which is becoming more scarce. Prices are only going to go up.”
