Water costs vary greatly about Oakland county, and around the US, and I have struggled in vain to find out why. In part the problem is that each city gets to add as much maintenance and management costs as the city government thinks appropriate. High management and infrastructure fees can increase to the cost of water, but I also not that different cities about Oakland County Michigan get their water at different rates from the multi-county organization that oversees water in South East Michigan: GLWA, The Great Lakes Water Authority.

I’ve attended meetings, both local and multi county and have tried to find out why one town gets its water at a far lower rate than another, near by. Towns get lower rates if they have a water tower, but it is not at all clear what the formula is. It also helps to separate the storm sewage from the sanitary sewage — something that I have proposed for all of Oakland county, but if there is fixed formula of how that affects rates, I’ve not seen it. And I wonder how well communities monitor the amount of storm sewage they generate.

The water itself is free. For the most part, in this county, we pump it from the Detroit river. Some of the rest of the water is pumped from wells. None of this costs anything. There is a pump cost, but it is manicure. Pumping 1 gallon of water up 75 feet, costs about 0.002¢ in pumping cost. The rest of the cost is infrastructure: the cost of the pumps, the pipes, the treatment, the billing and sewage. Among the sewage fees is a pollution penalty, and Oakland county pays plenty of pollution penalties. When it rains, we generate more sewage than the system will handle, and we dump the rest into the rivers and lakes. This results in closed beaches and poisoned fish, and fines too. The county pays the EPA when we do this, and the county passes the cost to the cities. I don’t know what the formula for fee distribution is, and don’t even know what it should be. What I do know is that we do this vastly too often.

Another oddity is that we bill on a per gallon basis. For my home, the bill is about 2¢/ gallon — 100 times the pumping cost. Though the city can claim that we are paying for infrastructure, both clean water infrastructure and sewage infrastructure, it seems odd to bill on a per-gallon used basis, and 1000 times the true per-gallon price. Since most of the price of water is the infrastructure and management cost, it seems like a regressive tax to charge people on the basis of per-gallon used. I also find it odd that cities do a propaganda campaign to tell folks to use less water. Why? I’d much prefer to charge a far lower base charge, and then bill significantly per-gallon. As with much that is socialist, the current system is inefficient, but pleasant for the management.

August 21, 20019, Robert Buxbaum