Nathan VanderKlippe
Northern News Services

Yellowknife (Sep 04/02) - The details haven't been decided yet, but one thing appears certain: water and garbage rates are likely to rise for Yellowknife homeowners.

On the flip side, businesses and apartment dwellers could see a decrease in their water bills.

City staff and councillors talked over a new way of billing residents at a committee meeting yesterday.

Although the city is far from making any decision on specifics of new rates, councillors made frequent use of the term "rate shock" while discussing a plan to match utility bills more closely with use.

Coun. Ben McDonald said dealing with the consequences of skyrocketing rates is a high political priority.

"It's going to be a political problem for us to re-jig the water bills," said McDonald. "There's going to be winners and losers and the losers are going to be mad at us."

It's called a user-pay system, and it is designed to level out charges.

Currently, residents pay too little for the water they consume and too much for the garbage the city picks up.

"Right now our structure recovers the amount of revenue we need. What it doesn't do is recover it fairly," said Robert Charpentier, the city's finance director.

Ratepayers are charged $10 a month for residential garbage pickup.

Water bills are split into five different rates, with residents charged $11.92 per thousand gallons plus a charge based on how many toilets are in the house.

The new water bill would charge a rate based on how much water is used.

That could be a stepped rate, charging a set price for the first 1,000 litres of water and then a different rate for any above that. Or it could be one rate per litre: the more you use, the more you pay.

In provisional numbers provided by Charpentier, the average individual homeowner would face an increase of about $16 a month on their water bills. But apartment-dwellers could see a decrease of $15 per unit, and commercial developments could have a $21 drop monthly.

Most councillors, with the exception of Alan Woytuik, agreed.

"But we're blessed with a country where we have all kinds of water," said Woytuik. "I don't want to have to tell my kids they can't shower as often as they like because they have to conserve water ... To me the need to conserve is not justified in this community."

For garbage, the city might introduce a tagging system where each household has a certain number of garbage bags per week -- three was one number considered -- and has to pay for any additional bags.

The point is to have people who use more pay more -- thereby promoting conservation.

New rates phased in

The new rates will likely be phased in to mitigate rate shock, which could be substantial.

The city currently pays $5.8 million a year to provide water.

A full 90 per cent of that figure is the fixed cost of providing water: installing water lines, pump houses and filtration systems.

David Connelly, a local businessman who sat in on the meeting, said he thinks a pay-per-use system is a good idea.

"Fundamentally, I think user pay tends to promote conservation and reduced use," he said.

But he criticized council for "not thinking outside the pie."

"The talk was about how to shift around ... (the way residents pay) rather than how, when we have such a vast quantity of water and access to new technologies, we can reduce the costs," said Connelly.