Hold on to your water faucets and spigots; water rates are going up again in Naperville. Naperville city officials are keeping residents busy running back and forth between their electric and water meters. No sooner do city officials give residents a round-house sucker punch with sky-rocketing electric rates, they then follow-up with a left jab and low blow in the form of rising water rates. Not only that, but city officials also want to inflict an upper cut to residents with a surcharge for water usage.
Naperville wants a 3% water rate increase per year through 2021, in addition to adding a 50-cent monthly surcharge this year, and increasing the surcharge to $1 monthly in 2018, then increasing it to $1.80 per month for the years 2019 through 2021. After that, if residents are still using water, the rates could challenge your car or mortgage payments. In essence, Naperville city officials raise the water rates because they can. It’s as simple as that.
City officials say the surcharge is to offset the expense of meeting new Illinois Environmental Protection Agency standards requiring the removal of phosphorus from wastewater prior to dumping it into the DuPage River. The surcharge is to keep the EPA happy, until the current federal administration can pull a Houdini on the EPA and make it disappear.
Why are Naperville city officials raising water rates? City officials say it’s needed to repay the Naperville electric utility the $14.5 million it borrowed from the Naperville water department. That’s some clever financing and money manipulation that city officials use. The water department borrows from the electric department which borrows from the water department, and the beat goes on and on. As long as water can keep borrowing from electric and vice versa…no problems. Perhaps Naperville can take over the internet for the city. Wifi can be considered a utility. Another department that needs a department head and another utility to borrow against.
It never ends with these clowns. If they don’t tax us outright they hide it on special fees, unjustified utility increases to cover chronic boondoggles like smart meters, car charging station, biofuel conversion plant just to name a few.
Election are coming up on Apr 4th. You may want to vote out some of these nitwits and install new blood who don’t look at their citizens as fools and cash cows. A good rule of thumb might be to vote for anyone who isn’t a incumbent because at this point what do you have to lose.
That election is April 2019, almost 22 months from now. We just had and election last April and it is every 2 years. So waiting until the next election isn’t very proactive.
OK Rip check your dates.
I agree that waiting for the next election is not proactive . Most of the new council members are sucked into the mindset of the existing bunch ,i.e. expand liquor licenses , disregard the increases for the utilities , and feed the rest of the citizens with empty promises . The future does not look too bright especially for the average citizen .
Speaking of wifi taxes, check your cell phone bill, there’s a Naperville “surcharge/tax” already on there.
So the Water Department “borrowing” from the Electrical Department, which owes it over $14 million makes sense? I believe that this “borrowing” is what most people would call accepting a partial payment for the previous $14 million loan. This is the type of logic that one would expect to lead to suggestions of solving these “problems” by selling the water utility
Water rate increases of this size are nothing new, it is part of keeping up the with cost increases produced by inflation in this utility’s operations.
As to costs from phosphorous discharge into the river. The health impact of high levels of phosphorous in drinking water is kidney failure and lose of calcium (you know that stuff bones and teeth are made of). Any agency that regulates what is going into our drinking and bathing water as well as the air we breath to make sure we are not being slowly killed in the name of greater corporate profits is not an organization I want a “Houdini” pulled on.
The increase in electric and water rates is just the beginning . In the electric area we are committed to buy from the IMEA for the foreseeable future . That is fine but we have no voice to stem the tide .Compared to other communities ands specifically the world our energy costs are very reasonable .
So let’s enjoy what we have since we have no lower costs alternatives .
Turn off the faucet and turn out the lights .
What we need to do is flatten the rising costs,” says OCC president Mr. O’Dette, who adds that there is “not much we can do at the moment to bend the cost curve on electricity rates.