New Water Rate Plan Taps Into Anger : Conservation: S.D. City Council resumes debate over proposal to link sewer rates to water use in single-family homes.

William Glaser’s spacious, elegantly landscaped Rancho Bernardo home consumes about 1,600 gallons of water daily, while Vivian Brown uses only about 60 gallons each day at her more modest Oak Park house.

Despite that gaping difference, both agree that the city of San Diego is all wet when it comes to its water and sewer bills.

“The situation is outrageous, a joke,” Brown said.

“It is absolutely ridiculous,” said Glaser, who has halved his water use over the past several years, to the visible detriment of his browning lawn and shrubbery. “It has reached the point where I am seriously considering moving to San Antonio.”

Two people approaching the issue from opposite ends yet regarding it with equal disdain helps explain why the City Council has been unable to resolve the thorny question of water and sewer rates after nearly two dozen meetings.

After several recent deadlocked votes, the council will again tackle the issue this week. But the council’s track record of indecisiveness, combined with the members’ increasingly contentious philosophical divisions, make a resolution as unlikely as another “March Miracle” of rainfall.

“I’m wondering whether we will ever get this off our agenda,” lamented Councilman George Stevens.

“There are such entrenched views that, frankly, I don’t see anything happening,” added Councilman Tom Behr. “The council is inclined to take the path of least resistance, which is a form of paralysis. It is really frustrating.”

Controversy over water and sewer rates has plagued the council since early last year, when a lingering drought, higher water prices, tighter supplies and burgeoning sewage system infrastructure needs confronted members with a series of politically unpopular choices.

Balancing economic realities against meteorological ones, the council in 1991 adopted a water rate structure designed to encourage conservation by penalizing those who failed to reduce consumption and instituted a tiered system linking sewer fees to water use.

Within months, the council rescinded both measures amid a firestorm of protest from angry citizens whose bills had risen dramatically. The protest was led by homeowners with large properties who, in some cases, saw their bimonthly water and sewer costs increase by hundreds of dollars.

That impasse set the stage for the current debate, which turns on many of the same questions, starting with the controversial and, from an opponents’ perspective, illogical, notion of tying sewer rates to water use in single-family homes. Although some council members would like to apply that same formula to multifamily complexes, the absence of individual water meters for each unit is an obstacle.

Currently, single-family homeowners pay a flat $20.39 monthly sewer bill, regardless of how much water they use. While heavy water users, for easily understood economic reasons, favor that approach, those who use little water complain that the flat fee does nothing to reward--and, in fact, often punishes--people who conserve, thereby saving water and reducing the strain on the city’s sewage system.

“With a flat fee, there is no incentive to conserve,” Stevens said. “The person who benefits is the one who uses a lot of water, not the one who saves. The priorities are backward.”

Oak park resident Brown, for example, used about $6 worth of water during one recent two-month billing cycle, but seethed over having to pay a sewer bill nearly seven times higher for the two-bedroom home that she shares with a friend.

“Why the hell am I cutting back when I pay $40 to flush down only $6 worth of water?” Brown asked. “That’s what makes me so mad. It just isn’t fair.”

Under one proposal before the council, a water-based sewer rate could reduce sewer bills to as low as $6 per month for single-family homeowners whose water use is far below the daily average of about 275 gallons.

That formula, however, would increase sewer charges for nearly half of all San Diegans, and could produce whopping triple-digit bills for homeowners with large lots that are extensively landscaped, according to city projections.

Hoping to avoid a repeat of last year’s acrimonious protests, the council is considering capping monthly sewer bills at either $26.10 or $40.60, depending on the water use level targeted in the formula. Critics are quick to note, however, that those ceilings still would raise current sewer rates by 28% and 99%, respectively.

Moreover, opponents of the proposed water-based sewer charges argue that the concept is inherently flawed, because only water used indoors, not that used for outdoor irrigation, ends up in the sewage system. Because most homes’ water meters do not distinguish between water consumed indoors and outdoors, many individuals could be financially penalized for using water that never reaches sewer pipelines, skeptics complain.

Only about 140 gallons of the 1,600 used daily at Glaser’s home, for example, are used indoors in the bathrooms, the kitchen and for laundry by Glaser and his wife--a comparison available only because the retired naval officer and engineer has gone to the trouble and expense of measuring it himself.

The remainder is used to irrigate Glaser’s extensive landscaping, much of it prescribed by city planning rules requiring ground cover to protect hillsides from erosion.

“I put in landscaping that I never would have put in if it wasn’t required, and now I’m being penalized for trying to keep it alive,” said Glaser, who already has lost some shrubbery and plants due to his vastly curtailed watering schedule.

“When the mayor asked people to conserve, I conserved,” Glaser said. “All we’re looking for is fairness and equity. No equation is totally fair to everyone. But a flat rate seems to be fairest.”

Even though most outdoor water does not enter the sewer system, proponents of water-based sewer fees defend the proposed billing formula as a means to encourage water conservation.

“If the amount of water you use, regardless of where you use it, is going to affect your sewer bill, you’re probably going to try to cut back,” Stevens said. “The more reasons you have to save, the more you will save.”

But Mayor Maureen O’Connor argues that adoption of any rate structure resulting in substantially higher water or sewer bills would “break faith” with San Diegans who have continued to heed the city’s call for voluntary water conservation.

“You’re punishing people who did everything and more than we asked of them,” O’Connor said. “It is unjust, and I won’t be part of it. If you wonder why people are so disillusioned with politicians, this is the answer.”