If all water customers were to stay within budget blocks 1 and 2, how would that affect usage and utility revenues?
If all customers were to stay within their budgeted amount and there wasn’t any usage in blocks 3, 4 or 5, the current rates would be too low to generate the required revenue for the city’s Water Utility. The city’s Water Utility needs to generate revenue of about $20 million per year. (This does not include the budgets for the Stormwater or Wastewater utilities.) The Utilities Division uses restricted funds, meaning all revenue collected by one utility (water, wastewater or stormwater/flood) stays within the utility to pay for all of its costs. The water revenue collected is used to pay for such things as system maintenance and repairs, operations, and water quality processes. Based on data from a rate analysis, the 2007 $2.50 base rate (Block 2) was chosen to ensure the utility would continue to collect enough revenue – but it also assumed that all the customers would NOT be able to stay within their budgets. If a lower rate option ($2.10) had been chosen, the city would have been at
