Rates and the EPA – Again

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Ok. So everyone’s got an opinion on rates and the CCSD budget. The temptation to micromanage and review every planned penny of expenditure is great. What may be useful is this tidbit from a report of a Working Group from 2003. The Working Group’s directive was evaluating the benchmarks used by the EPA to determine if a new regulation will be too expensive to implement. In the course of their examination, the work group asked for an analysis of the percent of Median Household Income spent on water. The consultants studied data from over a thousand water systems (enough to extrapolate to the 31,000 systems the EPA counts). What they found was not a single water bill greater than 2.0 percent of the Median Household Income. In fact, only 1% were greater than 1.5 percent, with the majority being under 1 percent MHI. (See quoted passage below or the complete report for more details.)

This information is useful in comparing our proposed rates to those paid by others around the country in an apples-to-apples manner. Most households pay between .5 percent and 1.5 percent of the Median Household Income for their community (or state, depending upon size). Cambria’s current Median Household Income is about $53,800 (Source: US Census Bureau + US Department of Labor Inflation calculator.) Doing the math:

I leave you to draw your own conclusions and invite your feedback (and arithmetic corrections).

From the National Small Systems Affordability Criteria Work Group:Recommendations to the
National Drinking Water Advisory Council:

Therefore, the Work Group asked consultants to use their database and information sources to try to determine if the SAB concern was justified. The consultant’s database was created from the 2000 U.S. Census and the 1995 Community Water Systems Survey. Included in the database are income and population data for 465 systems serving 25-500 people, 380 systems serving 501-3,300 people, and 211 systems serving 3,301-10,000 people. From these observations, water bill information is available for 163, 208, and 112 systems, respectively (by size class). Analyses of these systems can be extrapolated to the total population of small systems, which according to U.S. EPA includes 31,327 systems serving 25-500 people, 14,149 systems serving 501-3,300 people, and 4,458 systems serving 3,301- 10,000 people.
The consultants did not find a single system in the database whose water bill now exceeds 2.0 percent of MHI. Only seven systems in the database exceed 1.5 percent of MHI: two in the smallest size class, four systems in the next size class, and one system in the largest size class. These systems represent about 1 percent of all systems in each size class.3

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