HILO — Water bills will trickle down another few cents Monday, as the county Department of Water Supply passes along savings from lower electricity costs.
The Water Board approved a 4-cent reduction of the power cost charge on customers’ bills, dropping it to $1.81 per 1,000 gallons of water used. The adjustments were made after a public hearing in Hilo on Tuesday, where no members of the public testified.
State law requires a public hearing be held each time the rates go up or down. But the whole process irked Water Board member Leningrad Elarionoff, who voted against the reduction.
“I am not going to go along with this,” Elarionoff said. “This is a cumbersome way of doing 4 cents.”
Keith Okamoto, manager-chief engineer of the department, said it’s a good policy to hold the public hearings regardless of the amount. He said the cost of advertising and holding the hearings isn’t that much.
“We just think it’s fair for the customer,” Okamoto said. “If there is a change in the power cost charge, we do the calculations, we pass it on.”
The savings follow a 47-cent decrease in September.
For an average residential customer using 20,000 gallons of water in a two-month period, the change will lower the power cost charge by 80 cents over the two-month billing cycle, or 40 cents per month.
But bills are likely to go up anyway, starting July 1. The Water Board last summer unanimously approved a five-year water rate plan that hiked rates 3 percent last year, followed by 4 percent this year and then 5 percent annually for the next three years.
The water bill is made up of a static standby charge, a water usage rate and a power charge that fluctuates with the cost of electricity.
A typical family on a 5/8-inch meter using 9,500 gallons monthly saw their bimonthly bill go up from $101.75 to $104.96 last year.
That compares to $86.40 on Maui, $93.45 on Oahu and $129.55 on Kauai, according to consultant Ann Hajnosz of Brown and Caldwell. The actual cost to produce the water is about $4.13 per 1,000 gallons, she said. The consultant forecast revenues based on rates and usage, and then forecast expenditures based on costs of labor, operations and capital improvements, and found a gap that needed to be filled with a rate increase.
Under rules adopted by the Water Board in 2009, the power cost surcharge can be adjusted every two months. It’s applied to each 1,000 gallons of water used by the customer to account for fluctuations in the cost of energy needed to operate the water system.
The water department recently completed a study to look at the department’s current energy reduction efforts and recommend ways to achieve more savings. The department is the island’s largest customer of electricity, spending more than $22.3 million for electricity in 2014.