Flin Flonners will likely pay a bit less for water and sewer service this year, thanks to a long-used deficit charge coming off the books.
Council gave first reading to new water and sewer rates for the coming year during their Jan. 3 meeting, giving approval to rates set out in a long-term deal by the previous council.
For 2023, expenses relating to water and sewer services will either stay the same or actually drop for City taxpayers. The reason for the change is the City eliminating deficit reduction payments on water and sewer service, which usually add just over $5 a month to water and sewer expenses.
Expenses for unmetered monthly rates will stay at $104.81, the same rate as the past two years, but the extra $5.06 cost of the deficit reduction rider has been removed, dropping the overall cost by just over $5 a month and just over $60 a year in total savings.
For unmetered quarterly rates, the base cost of $314.43 will stay the same, but the deficit reduction rider for those costs will also be removed, cutting those costs by about $15.18 per quarter.
For metered monthly minimum charges, consumption costs will also be free of deficit reduction payments. For someone who uses 6,000 gallons of water a month, for instance, the monthly total cost will go from $79.02 to $73.93, another saving of just over $60. For heavy-duty users, using 180,000 gallons of water per month, expenses will go from $2,674.38 a month to $2,669.32 a month - yet another savings of just over $60.
That deficit payment came about as part of a plan to pay off a utility deficit several years ago - including a small payment each pay cycle to help offset that expense. That payment was finished on the last day of 2022, allowing the City to move ahead without it.
“What happened a number of years ago was there was a deficit in the utility and the Public Utilities Board wanted us to make up that deficit. What the City did, at that time, was add the $5.06 as a deficit reduction measure and we ended up carrying that over all the way to the end of Dec. 31, 2022 and the board told us that was the end of it,” said City interim chief administrative officer Lyn Brown.
The City’s water and sewer rates for the future aren’t yet determined. The City will need to do a full water rate study this summer to determine what the fees will be going forward.
“They’ve also told us that we need to do a water rate study before the end of June 2023, so that will give us what our new rates will look like going into 2024 and beyond,” said Brown.
The City will bear the cost of that study, which will determine if rates go up, go down or stay the same and by how much they may change.
“We have done the water rate studies in the past and they're extraordinarily excruciating and time-consuming. We are a very unique community in Manitoba with our utilities, because of all the sewer boxes and the bedrock,” said Brown.
“The board tends to look at us the same way as they look at other municipalities in the province. This time, when we do the water rate study, we're going to have someone come and work with us through the study who understands and works with the board, so that we can take our uniqueness and explain it to the board. Hopefully moving forward, both of us will have an understanding of what our uniqueness is all about in Flin Flon and we'll move forward in a much better way.”
