This month on “Wonderful Water,” join 97.9 The Hill’s Brighton McConnell for a conversation with Stephen Winters, director of finance and customer service for OWASA. As another fiscal year passes, OWASA will hold virtual public hearings on Thursday, May 27, on the proposed budget and rate adjustment for 2022.
Next year’s OWASA budget will pay for investments necessary to provide water and sewer service and protect the environment and public health, including the retention of a highly skilled and dedicated workforce. In the past year, taking into account measures taken to respond to COVID-19 as a community, OWASA adapted its working budget to suit the needs of its neighbors.
“We decided to forgo a five percent rate increase that we had planned to implement last October,” said Winters. “… We delayed several large improvements, projects, and employees didn’t receive any pay increases. What made this more difficult — again, because of the pandemic — was the community using a lot less water than a normal times … [which] meant we had even less revenue than normal to support the organization. And so, some of those impacts have rolled through to this coming year’s budget.”
One of OWASA’s measures was a temporary moratorium on disconnections from lack of payment, a policy that is still in effect.
“The moratorium basically means that we’re not disconnecting anyone’s water service because they haven’t paid their bill,” said Winters. “That moratorium went into effect in March of 2020, in the very earliest stages of the pandemic … These moves were, are, significant to our customers. From a losses standpoint, it’s not insignificant, but it’s not a catastrophic financial impact on us. … While there’s more people on this list of people that would be normally be subject to service disconnection, there’s far more than there normally is, but it’s still fortunately a small fraction of our entire customer base.”
According to Winters, OWASA will provide a 30 day advance notice of the moratorium ending, whenever that takes place, and when the organization does resume service disconnections for nonpayment, customers will be provided with “extended payment plans, so they won’t have to pay the balance all at once.”
You can find out more about OWASA’s budget for 2021 on their website, and a public hearing on OWASA’s proposed budget and rate adjustment is scheduled for 6 p.m. Thursday, May 27, 2021. You can register to speak at the meeting by emailing Clerk to the Board Andrea Orbich by 3 p.m. the day of the meeting.
Featured image via the Orange Water and Sewer Authority.
You can listen below to the full conversation with Stephen Winters below, and visit the Wonderful Water page here for more interviews and stories about the work OWASA does in our community.
Chapel Hill and Carrboro residents use roughly 7 million gallons of water a day, and “Wonderful Water” is a monthly conversation sponsored by the Orange Water and Sewer Authority highlighting its work to keep our community growing and water flowing.
