Rate Increase From County Water Supplier Expected

Rohnert Park residents may avoid an increase to their water rates for the third straight year despite an anticipated rate hike by the Sonoma County Water Agency, which supplies most of the town's water.

According to Rohnert Park Vice Mayor Jake Mackenzie, city officials will likely determine the town's water rates for the upcoming fiscal year (which begins July 1) in May, after it is established in April what the SCWA will charge to contract towns – including Rohnert Park.

The SCWA recently recommended a 5 percent rate hike for most of the municipalities it supplies, but the new rates have yet to be approved by the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors, which is scheduled to vote on the issue April 19.

“I'm assuming [the increase] will be approved – they won't mess with that,” Mackenzie said.

Mackenzie said city officials would consider the SCWA rate increase (if it is approved) on contract districts and other factors to determine whether to increase rates for town residents. 

He said the impact of an SCWA rate increase would be mitigated by the town's heavy reliance on groundwater, which is significantly cheaper than SCWA-supplied water. Rohnert Park gets about 40 percent of its potable water from underground wells, with the remaining 60 percent coming from the SCWA, according to Mackenzie.

SCWA Public Information Officer Brad Sherwood said the SCWA's rates have been increasing at about a 5 percent clip for the last 15 years. According to city records, Rohnert Park's rates have not increased since 2008 – although they went up 5 percent from 2006-2007, and 11 percent from 2007-2008. For residents getting their water through a one-inch diameter pipe, the current monthly rate is $18.32, according to the records; that cost goes up for major water users, Mackenzie said.

Mackenzie said a number of programs have helped spur a trend of water conservation among town residents, including the use of meters showing residents their level of water use, increased purchases of low flow toilets and shower heads, and educational measures around efficient garden maintenance and land irrigation.

“I think the primary factor is the use of the meters telling people exactly how much water they're using, and showing them the correlation between how much water they use and what the costs are,” Mackenzie said.

Yet, for towns that rely on outside water suppliers, the economics of water conservation can be a mixed bag.

Sherwood said increases in the SCWA's rates have been driven by two key factors. One is the cost of the federally mandated Russian River Biological Opinion assessment, a 15-year study aimed at protecting certain endangered species of fish in the Russian River through information-gathering and environmental improvement projects; the other is a trend toward conserving water among county residents and a resulting decline in the volume of water being sold.

“We sold less water last year – roughly 4 percent less last year from the year prior, and when we're reducing deliveries by 4 percent it adds 4 percent to our rates,” Sherwood said. “It's usually a direct, one-to-one correlation (between the percentage drop-off in consumption and the resulting rate increase).”

Yet, he was quick to add that, even though rate increases are a corollary of water conservation, measures to save water actually prevent more dramatic and less predictable cost fluctuations.

“That is our goal – we are in the business of water conservation,” Sherwood said. “People say, 'Why do I have to conserve if you're going to charge me more money?' Well, there are unseen savings because the Water Agency and our contractors have to pay for capital improvement projects, such as expanding the pipelines and building more pumps, and that would be the outcome if use went up. It would cost millions of dollars to expand our water supply system.”