We’ve been having an interesting discussion here about Richmond City’s (possibly) unreasonable minimum monthly water bill. To summarize where we are so far:

• Richmond City residents pay a minimum monthly water bill of 43.55$ regardless of how much water they actually use.
• The average American uses around 400 cubic feet of water a month (supposedly).
• If you use between zero and 10,000 cubic feet of water a month you pay 0.01144$ per cubic foot of water (and 0.01684$ per cubic foot of water water (this is based on how much water you use, not how much is actually waste)).
• If you use between 10,100 and 200,000 cubic feet of water you pay 0.00585$ per cubic foot of water. A savings of 49%.
• Richmond seems to have a much higher minimum monthly water bill than the surrounding counties. Henrico, for instance, has a minimum monthly bill of 26.50$ and that includes 600 cubic feet of water.
• A couple of surrounding counties bill utilities on a bi-monthly schedule. The idea is if you can send out 1.5M less bills each year you can save some cash.

A couple of thoughts that came out of the discussion:

• It seems unjust to charge poor people a (possibly) unreasonable amount for a life necessity.
• Switching to a bi-monthly billing schedule would put an unreasonable strain on poor families, especially in the winter months when gas bills are in the 300$-400$ range per month.
• It might be good to give a “deep discount” to customers who use a small amount of water.
• Perhaps businesses, especially restaurants, depend on the bulk water usage discount. Increasing their rates would ultimately hit our pockets somewhere down the line.
• There is no incentive to conserve water.

Now the question is, “where do we go from here?” Richmond’s Green Party representative, Scott Burger, addressed the City Council about this issue on Monday. I guess a starting point would be to contact your city council representative. A good idea might be to organize a bit and come up with some solutions, or gather some more information.

Also, Burger is offering 100$ cash to anyone that can “find any city in the entire United States that has amore[sic.] regressive minimum water and sewer rate than Richmond’s.” More details after the jump.

The contest is to discover minimum service charge rates for a city’s residential water and sewer, which,like Richmond,do not include any water (For example, Baltimore’s minimum rate is actually higher than Richmond’s but it includes 10 ccf’s of water.) The first person who names a city with a verifiable minimum water and sewer utility rate more regressive than Richmond and contacts Richmond Green Party Chairperson Scott Burger at his email address, scottburger@mac.com, will receive a $100 cash. The contest will last 30 days. If there is no winner the money will be donated to Richmond’s Earth Day celebration.