We want you to be “Water empowered.” and learn about what a rate increase means, the value of the water available to you, what your rates go toward, and how you can cut your cost. This video gives brief detail on all these subjects, and there’s more that can be discussed.
Overall, your rates are what cover the construction, operation, maintenance, and replacement of the infrastructure in the neighborhood. All of this is necessary to produce, treat, and process high-quality water that meets or exceeds regulatory standards.
This helps us to provide the necessary resources like operations teams, customer service representatives, electricity, chemicals, repairs, water quality sampling and testing, gasoline, vehicles, and facility maintenance. It also pays for federal, state, property, and school district taxes that benefit the community.
Our cost to provide service increases periodically due to the ongoing facility upgrades required to maintain and even improve the level of service expected by our customers. Another reason for an increase is because of cost inflation, you may notice this when the cost of buying everyday items increases.
Think about the price of a gallon of water purchased from the supermarket versus a gallon from the tap. A gallon’s worth of single-serve bottled water costs over hundreds of times the price of tap water, three times the national average price for a gallon of milk, and four times the national average price for a gallon of regular grade gasoline. While milk and gas are both considered essential, water is the only utility that you consume in order to survive, and water from the tap is clearly the best value.
Your water bill pays for clean and reliable water. It also pays for what the dedicated employees at SouthWest Water do behind the scenes to get it to your house. We will continue to make you aware when we are working on projects that benefit the neighborhood and whenever our costs to provide service need to be reviewed.
We hope this information has been helpful to understand your bill. If you have further questions, contact your state’s Customer Care.