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The Cincinnati Beacon
Paying for Imaginary Flushes
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Posted by Michael Earl Patton
It seems obvious, but people generally use less of something if they have to pay for it. Most people would assume that the more they use, the more they pay. The more you drive, the more gasoline you have to buy, and the more you pay for that gasoline. The more you run your air conditioner, the more you pay in electricity. No one would ever imagine a system where one paid for running the air conditioner 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no matter if it were turned on or off. Yet something similar happens to many customers when they pay their water bills.
For Cincinnati residents and many in the suburbs, the Greater Cincinnati Water Works sends out the bills not only for the water, but also for the Metropolitan Sewer District (MSD). Unless you have a septic tank, you pay for your water twice—once as it comes out of the faucet or shower head, and again as it goes down the drain. Most of the charge is for when it goes down the drain.
There is a base rate for the clean water, and an additional charge for the amount. For a single-family house in Cincinnati the base charge is $10.75 per quarter; to this is added a charge of $1.67 per hundred cubic feet, or ccf, of water used (up to 60 ccf, after which the use charges go down somewhat).
The sewer charges are handled differently. A single-family house in Cincinnati is charged for sending 900 cubic feet down the drain actually uses less than 900 ccf—I myself only used 420 cubic feet in the past quarter. Still, I was charged for the full 900, which came to $56.40. This is over and above the charge for the fresh water itself, which was $7.01.
There is therefore almost no incentive for many of us to save water. If I were to cut my usage in half, I would save only $3.50 in fresh water charges and still have to pay $56.40 for the sewage, even though the amount sent down the drain was also cut in half. Yet MSD tells us that the sewer plants often cannot handle the usage so they will be investing hundreds of millions to expand capacity. Shouldn’t the charges be designed to encourage water-saving? I had been trying to save water, and was even considering a water-saving type washer, but why should I invest extra money?
This, by the way, does not affect apartments and most condos because they almost always share a single meter and so their total usage is high. Households that use a lot of water are also not affected. But somewhat perversely, it affects precisely those households that use relatively little water. The more successful they are at saving water, the more they pay per gallon. They wind up paying for imaginary shower drain water and toilet flushes.
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