The Abridged version:
- The West Sacramento City Council on Wednesday will discuss four options for raising water and sewer rates.
- Capital improvement needs have increased over the last decade or so, and the bill is coming due.
- Rates likely won’t increase until next year, and ratepayers will have the chance to weigh in.
At the George Kristoff Water Treatment Plant in West Sacramento, a lone underground manifold keeps tens of thousands of taps from going dry.
“It’s the only one there, so if it went down, we wouldn’t have water in the city,” said Amber Wallace, senior civil engineer for West Sacramento, during a Nov. 12 presentation to the city’s Environment and Utilities Commission.
For years, the manifold — an engineering device used to distribute water — has done its job, but officials are starting to worry that there might be something wrong.
“It’s underground, it’s buried, we think there’s problems with it, but we can’t see it,” Wallace said. “We just don’t have the money for construction.”
The manifold, which city staff estimates will cost roughly $10 million to replace, is just one part of an aging water and sewer system that is past due for maintenance. To pay for the infrastructure projects, many of which have been deferred for years, the West Sacramento City Council on Wednesday will discuss potential utility rate increases.
“There’s just a lot of needs, and we don’t have the funds to keep up with the needs of the city,” Wallace said. “You’ve got ticking time bombs underground.”
Delayed maintenance in West Sacramento
According to a staff report submitted to the City Council ahead of Wednesday’s meeting, repair, replacement and monitoring projects could cost up to $137 million over the next five years. The last time the city’s water and sewer infrastructure needs were assessed in 2017, city staff identified $43 million worth of projects.
For years, West Sacramento officials have prioritized keeping rates low at the expense of some preventive maintenance projects. By 2017, the last time rates were studied, West Sacramento residents were paying the third lowest in the region, just above Roseville and Folsom. Rate adjustments were last implemented in 2021.
“The direction really was to keep rates low,” said Roberta Raper, director of finance for West Sacramento, during the Nov. 12 presentation. “They wanted to keep rates low for customers and to not impact them after the Great Recession.”
But that left utility officials with little money for anything other than emergency fixes. In their report to the City Council, city staff said that repairs have often come on a “reactive basis, addressing system failures as they occur rather than through planned preventative maintenance.”
The result is a water and sewer infrastructure that needs both larger capital improvements and smaller ongoing maintenance like sewer cleaning and water meter replacements.
Four options to raise utilities rates
On Wednesday, four rate increase scenarios will be presented to the council, according to the staff report attached to Wednesday’s agenda.
The “full-ask” scenario, which would provide the city with enough money to fund all of its identified water and sewer improvement projects, would have a “bill impact” of 75% over five years.
The “low” scenario would raise rates 56% over the next five years but provide the city with much less to spend on the needed projects.
City staff and the utilities commission have recommended something in between. The commission proposal would mean a 61% rate increase over five years — as opposed to the staff-proposed “mid” scenario of 54%.
Though the council will discuss the scenarios on Wednesday, it will not take an official vote on rate increases until next year. Until then, water and sewer rates in West Sacramento will remain the same.
The City Council plans to schedule a public hearing for March 18.
Daniel Hennessy joins Abridged from the California Local News Fellowship. He’s a reporter covering Yolo County.