PORT ANGELES – The Clallam County PUD Board of Commissioners Monday approved rate hikes for their customers that will take effect February 1 next year and for each of the next four years after that.
Rate payers will see an average hike of 4.2% for water service over the next 5 years and an average of 5.9% per year for wastewater. That pencils out to an increase after 5 years of 12-to-13 dollars for the average ratepayer. By comparison, in the years 2017, ’18 and ’19 the average increase on your water rate was 7%, so in that sense this can be considered an improvement.
We asked PUD Finance Manager Sean Worthington what it is that’s driving rates up every year.
“Yeah, the main driver for costs going up is obviously inflation, you know, it cost us more to purchase materials and supplies to complete the projects that are necessary in the system. The water system also took on some additional debt in 2019. So there’s an increased debt service expense. And then we have inflationary increases associated with our collective bargaining agreement, so our personnel costs are also increasing.”
Worthington says something new they’re going to implement is a phased-in program of making everyone’s rates the same, regardless of where you live, which he says will benefit everyone in the system.
“We also did a cost-of-service study to help us move to a phased-in approach of moving all rates to the same for all water systems, and then all rates the same for all wastewater systems. For example, we have a system in Gales and then we have a system may be out in Sekiu, and so the rates that the customers paying those two systems are different. And so we’re trying to bring rate parity to the water district as a whole, and so that’s why we’re moving all rates to the same.”