The Town of Athabasca will soon notice a rise the amount that it pays for water.
Athabasca town councillor Nicole Adams, and council’s representative on the Aspen Regional Water Services Commission, announced at council’s meeting last Tuesday that the commission has approved a four-per-cent increase – or six cents per cubic metre – in the municipal water rate.
This increase is due to a large drop in water usage in Athabasca.
“The town usage is way down,” Adams explained.
“We raised our water rates, people could be using less water. It could be either or it could be both because we’re just using a lot less water overall. It could be we patched our water lines. It’s probably a mixture of them.”
The fact that water rates are going up partly because people are conserving didn’t sit well with many of the councillors.
“We’ll be penalizing them for conserving water by raising cubic amounts,” councillor Timothy Verhaeghe said.
“Also, the taxpayers don’t have a whole lot of say in the budget that our commission has, they just kind of pass it and we have to go along with it. It just seems that there’s something wrong with how this is working.”
Mayor Roger Morrill questioned if there could be something to be done to bring down the costs related to running the water treatment plant.
“I think that’s something that I, personally, would like to know,” he said.
“There’s two sides to this equation. One big side is the expense and we can control that to some degree.”
Adams responded by saying they were running a “bare bones” operation as it was, only doing what is needed to be done by law.
“I don’t know what the solution is because if we don’t sell water, there’s no revenues coming in and that’s the only revenue we have. There are some possible revenue streams that we’re looking at,” added Adams.
“They’re talking about opening up a 700-man working camp in Wandering River.
“That will give us additional revenue, but of course, we don’t have that as a concrete thing that we can count on yet.
“It sucks, but it’s the situation that we’re in.”
