These high sewer rates coming as Bellingham replaces treatment plant incinerators
Bellingham residents are looking at sewer rate hikes that could double or triple current rates over the next five to 10 years as the city looks at making its Post Point wastewater treatment plant more environmentally sound.
No action has been taken, but members of the City Council’s Public Works and Natural Resources Committee got their first look at proposed higher rates in a meeting Monday, Feb. 28.
Preliminary figures were shown as part of City Council discussion of options regarding how to get rid of solid waste left from the sewage-treatment process at the city moves forward with replacing its aging incinerators at a cost of more than $220 million.
“We discussed the possibility of rate increases, or the need for rate increases, in late 2021. We need to start ramping that conversation up,” said Eric Johnston, director of the Public Works Department.
“The sooner we start seeing an increase in rates, the lesser the impact will be to our ratepayers,” Johnston said.
Council members should also discuss sewer rate discounts for low-income residents, disabled people and retirees, he said.
New “digestion” processes under consideration will create waste that can be used as fertilizer, instead of being burned, and council members will be asked to choose among three options that carry varying price tags.
Each of the three scenarios for rate increases starts with a 12% hike this year, from $47 monthly to $52 monthly for a single-family home.
Rates would keep rising at a 12% annual rate through 2027 or 2032, before leveling off at either $89 or $135 monthly, according to charts included with the committee’s agenda.
In summer 2021, in anticipation of the rate increases, Bellingham started billing its customers monthly instead of every other month for water, sewer and stormwater runoff.
Base rate for a single-family home with a 5/8-inch meter inside the city limits was $192.61 every other month in August 2021. That includes $46.43 for water, $93.36 for sewer, $23.70 for stormwater (medium-sized home), and a $29.12 watershed fee.
Currently, solid waste that’s left from the sewage-treatment process is burned in giant ovens at the Post Point facility that were built in 1974, and the resulting ash is sent to a landfill.
Those incinerators are expensive to repair and could fail irreparably at any time, city officials have said.
Replacing the incinerators is costing more money as the city focuses on a “triple bottom line plus” concept for measuring the socio-economic cost of a project in addition to its financial impact — something that the Harvard Business School calls the “Three P’s: profit, people, and the planet.”
Instead of burning solid waste, the new plant will create what the Environmental Protection Agency calls Class A biosolids that can be used as fertilizer or compost for growing fruits and vegetables.
