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Quality Growth
Smart planning for a
long-term economic improvement. more»
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Safety, security, and citizen involvement help Raleigh thrive. more»
Environment
Keeping Raleigh green, sustainable, and healthy looking forward. more»
Fiscal Responsibility
Leading by example with
a consistent focus on taxpayers' wallets. more»

Saving Water and Ratepayer Dollars

In April of this year, I led the effort to reduce the City Manager's proposed 17% water rate increase. Here's how: for decades, the conventional wisdom has been that drinking water is a limitless resource, and that so long as we could sell more - especially for irrigation in summer months - we could pay for new water and sewer treatment plants without raising rates.

But the drought of 2007-2008 brought home three important realities:
First,
that our water supplies are reaching their limits.
Second,
when water sales are down due to the drought and citizen conservation efforts, ratepayers can't be expected to make up all the difference for the lost revenues.
Third,
it makes little sense to pay for expensive peak capacity, just to accommodate the tens of millions of gallons of drinking water we put out on the ground for landscaping in hot summer months. Instead, we should be incentivizing new 'green' businesses to provide rainwater harvesting and water-efficient landscapes.
The responsibility of moving from a consumption based water utility system to a conservation based system has to be borne more broadly. Here are the initiatives that I championed:
  1. Requiring newcomers to pay a fairer share of the new capacity costs they create
  2. Delaying millions of dollars of non-essential utility capital projects,
  3. Implementing tiered water rates to reward low-water users with lower rates, while setting higher rates for large water users to encourage conservation, and
  4. Incentivizing water-conserving businesses and practices. 
These initiatives may sound self-evident now, but the work required to convince a Council majority that the City's multi-million dollar Public Utilities Enterprise was headed in an unsustainable direction took almost a year of determined effort.

Click here to see annotated Council minutes documenting Russ's effort to save water and ratepayer dollars.