CUB Starts to Wade into Water and Sewer Rates
Posted on January 29, 2014 by Jeff Bissonnette
Tags, Consumers and Utility Customers, Legislative & Political, Portland Water, Sewer and Wastewater
One of the best things about starting to work on water and sewer issues is the great wordplay you can do. It may be corny but when the opportunity for humor presents itself, we can’t help ourselves.
But keeping rates affordable and making sure that customers are getting quality service is no laughing matter. So CUB is getting serious about digging into the details of the Portland Water Bureau (PWB) and the Bureau of Environmental Services (BES), which manages sewer and stormwater operations.
As we noted a couple of weeks ago, the Portland City Council designated CUB as the residential ratepayer advocate for water and sewer customers in the city. The response from CUB members has been strongly supportive. Representative of the response is a comment from members who are retired on a fixed income from Southwest Portland:
“We are very pleased to have CUB as a consumer advocate monitoring Portland utilities! We are very pleased with the work CUB has done for years at the state level. We would like to dramatically increase our support but that is not possible at our income and age. We hope that working Portlanders will give you adequate support.”
We really appreciate the support as we start to work hard to find places where customers can either save money or make sure they are getting good value for the money they are paying in rates. To that end, we’ve been meeting with staff from the City Budget Office who work with the PWB and BES budgets. We also attended a city council workshop where volunteer members of the Portland Utility Review Board (PURB) were providing insights to city council members on rate issues and longer-term policy issues. Most important, we’ve started to dig through lots of paper and data.
Yesterday we sent letters requesting information to the heads of both bureaus. This information will answer questions we have and give us the ability to do solid analysis to make recommendations about how to best serve customers. Copies of the letters we sent can be found here so you can get an idea about the kinds of things we’re looking for.
Some final items: the Portland Utility Review Board is in need of volunteer members. Information about the important work that PURB does is on the City of Portland website. We’ll be writing more soon about the PURB’s tasks and the critical role they play in making recommendations about rates and policy. But they need members now so please consider volunteering your time on the PURB.
One last thing - please join CUB or renew your membership. Your membership contribution helps ensure CUB’s independence, lets us ask the questions that need to be asked and make sure ratepayers are getting their money’s worth. Portlanders will get a chance to join CUB by getting an insert in their water and sewer bill starting in April. But why wait? Joining or renewing now starts making a difference right away. It may seem like just a drop in the bucket but your membership will have a huge ripple effect.
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04/05/17 | 0 Comments | CUB Starts to Wade into Water and Sewer Rates