By Mary O’KEEFE

Crescenta Valley Water District (CVWD) is proposing a different way of billing customers for water, and a changed billing calendar. 

“We’re [also] changing the rate structure itself,” said James Lee, director of CVWD. 

The proposed rates are part of Prop 218, which was voted on in 1996, will be a more traditional inclining tier rate structure.

“Basically you have a monthly chart and then you have different tiers for pricing,” he added. 

The second big change will be that CVWD is moving from a bi-monthly billing to a monthly billing cycle. This is the more common way of billing and is a schedule most water companies follow. 

The bottom line concerning the proposed billing change is that the average bill will go up. This increase is due to increasing costs of water and of infrastructure maintenance. 

“It’s really [difficult] to determine how it’s going to go for each customer just because of this new rate structure. In total the District’s going to be collecting 8% more revenue, which is needed to cover our expenses,” said Arturo Montes, CVWD Finance and Administration manager. 

The average customer will see a billing fee increase of about $7 per month on the water side and roughly $8 a month for sewer charges. These proposed rates will be discussed at an upcoming CVWD board of directors meeting on June 10 from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the La Crescenta Elementary School, 4343 La Crescenta Ave. If approved by the board of directors, the new rate structure will take effect on and after July 1, 2025. 

For households, budgets are based on the size of the yard, the number of people in the house and real-time weather data. Indoor budgets are based on household size. The default household size is four, based on the average of household size from the 2020 U.S. Census data. Customers may request a variance if the household size is different than four. Wastewater rates are based on the number of people reported. So it is important that customers contact CVWD to let it know the size of the household. Outdoor budgets are based on irrigable area, calculated as 30% of the lot size, with a maximum of 4,353 square feet, according to CVWD. 

Lee said as a water district it is looking at what it can control and what it can’t. Among the things that it can’t control are the costs of buying water, the costs of power and the weather. But what it can do is manage the agency in a responsible way and try to anticipate issues that may arise in the future– and plan ahead. 

“The costs of [buying water] is going up. We’ve been told it’s going up between 11% to 15% each year for the next three years,” Lee said. 

Lee added as an agency it just has to get the invoices and pay the costs. 

“We are focusing on what we can control,” he said. 

That includes going after any grants, both federal and state, and CVWD is partnering with neighboring agencies. It also looked at pipelines, the “backbone of its infrastructure.” Contractors’ prices continue to rise so CVWD management looked into what it could do to control those costs by going in-house when repairs are needed to be made.

“At the time it was a completely wild idea … but we’re about to finish our sixth project and we’ve saved hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Lee said. 

In the past, it would hire outside contractors to perform pipeline replacement and repair. This is a standard practice; however, CVWD explored the option of having the repairs done by its own employees and it has been a successful program. It will be asking the CVWD board of directors to make this a permanent program. 

Even the recent Rosemont Preserve project in which a bioswale was dug to capture rainwater was an in-house project. 

“We made it a training exercise for our excavation crew,” Lee said. 

Lee said CVWD cannot say that rates will not go up again in the future; however, there are two things it can do to help.

“We can slow down how much rates are going up – that’s number one. And number two – with the money that we do have we can really focus on providing a higher level of services, whether it’s more reliable infrastructure or just  responding to customers more promptly,” he said. 

The public can find out more about the proposed rate change by going to http://www.cvwd.com/rates.

Protest letters are being accepted until 4 p.m. on June 10. There is also a bill calculator at the website address where customers can see a preview of how the proposed rates may affect their household.