That water costs for commercial and industrial users would rise under the recently implemented metered water system in Drayton and Moorefield was not only expected, but appropriate.
Part of the reasoning, after all, was to illustrate the actual costs of delivering water to customers who were used to thinking of this valuable resource as all but free, and encouraging conservation.
Mapleton council was confronted with the new reality of the situation at the Nov. 10 meeting, when a local car wash operator pointed out the metered system has resulted in a 300 per cent increase in the water costs for his business.
Council is rightly concerned about the possibility of losing businesses due to the added operational costs of realistically-priced water. And in this case, there appears to be some room for remediation. However, council shouldn’t overreact out of fear of an exodus of business to some mythical low-water-rate districts. Most municipalities that have avoided it to this point, have been pretty much compelled by new provincial expectations on cost recovery to install a metered system. Most are also attempting to reduce the level of subsidization for high-consumption users in order to both encourage conservation and be fair to modest users.
Why, for example, should the owner of a personal vehicle that might get washed monthly help to pay, through rate subsidization, the costs for a business with a fleet of pickups that get washed weekly? Perhaps it should cost $16, not $4 to wash your vehicle?
The problems created by a blasé approach to the true cost of water obviously go far beyond the municipal level. Recent publicity surrounding a water-taking permit application in Centre Wellington by Nestle Waters Canada has highlighted the fee set by Ontario’s natural resources ministry, which is only $3.71 per million litres. That million litres for a water bottler could generate $2 million through the sale of half-litre bottles. Meanwhile the province recovers only 1.2 per cent of the $16.2 million it spends each year on water quantity management programs. Again, taxpayers subsidizing business profiting from access to a natural resource.
It’s actually imperative to change people’s attitudes about water conservation. Contrary to popular perception, the supply is not infinite. A new study from the University of Victoria indicates just six per cent of the groundwater around the world is replenished within a “human lifetime” of 50 years. Combine that with studies showing one-third of the world’s aquifers are “overstressed” because they have almost no new water flowing in to offset usage, and you can see why we need to stop thinking of water as something we can waste in guilt-free fashion.
Patrick Raftis
