A majority of Marin residents’ water bills will see significant increases beginning in July as the Marin Municipal Water District looks to make historic investments in new water supplies and recover from the recent drought.
The agency’s board of directors voted 4-1, with Director Larry Russell dissenting, on Tuesday to approve a plan to hike water rates and fees for the next four years.
The Marin Municipal Water District is poised to adopt one of its largest rate hikes in decades on Tuesday — a move that will increase water costs for customers by about 20% — but staff costs are not the driver, utility officials said.
The Marin Municipal Water District’s directors are on a political hot seat.
They are considering a four-year plan of raising rates, possibly as much as 20% for most customers, to right MMWD’s fiscal ship and pay for expanding the district’s storage capacity and make needed repairs.
The Marin Municipal Water District board is considering raising rates for the first time since 2019 in response to sobering financial forecasts. District staff told the board Monday that unless the agency can find more revenue, the effects of inflation, drought and maintaining the water supply system could deplete reserve funds by mid-2024 and increase budget deficits as high as $45 million in the coming years.
As part of its study of new water supplies, the Marin Municipal Water District is planning a public workshop later this month to review how it will rate and compare the various options it is considering.
The online meeting at 5 p.m. Oct. 25 will provide an opportunity for the public to ask questions of district staff and its consultants who are drafting the water supply report.
Marin Municipal Water District officials, continuing their quest to boost supply, met this week for a detailed cost assessment on expanding reservoirs and connecting to new sources.
District staff stressed to the board that — unlike other options under review such as desalination and recycled water expansion that can produce a continual flow of water — enlarging reservoirs or building pipelines to outside suppliers does not guarantee water will be available when needed.
The Marin Municipal Water District took a deeper look at some of the more complex and expensive options on the table for new supply: desalination plants and recycled water.
The district board and consultants with the Jacobs Engineering firm held discussion Tuesday on the preliminary cost estimates, water yields and challenges of building desalination plants and expanding the district’s recycled water system.
The Marin Municipal Water District has failed to adequately prepare for severe drought and should create a four-year water supply, the Marin civil grand jury said in a new report.
Last year, the district faced depleting local reservoir supplies as soon as summer 2022. While rains in late 2021 nearly refilled reservoirs, the drought “exposed serious shortcomings” in the district’s ability to offer a reliable water supply and has shaken public confidence in the district’s leadership, the report states.
When Marin last considered building a desalination plant on San Francisco Bay more than a decade ago, residents wary of the high financial and environmental costs reacted by giving voters the power to make that decision.
Now comes the question: should voters retain the power to block what could be an emergency source of water in the event of another crisis?
“The strange weather we’ve had the last few years I think suggests that having more options in the event of a similar kind of emergency we were in this past year is prudent,” Marin Municipal Water District General Manager Ben Horenstein told the district Board of Directors on Tuesday. “With this ordinance in place, it does limit our ability in certain ways to move forward if we wanted to with an emergency desal system.”
Most Marin County residents will once again be allowed to turn on their sprinklers following a nearly three-month ban.
The Marin Municipal Water District board voted unanimously on Tuesday to allow the district’s 191,000 residents in central and southern Marin to use outdoor sprinklers and drip irrigation two days per week. Outdoor irrigation using potable water supplies had been banned since Dec. 1 in response to the drought.
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