New York City officials plan to raise rates 11.5 percent on the water that every New Yorker uses, the largest annual increase in 15 years.The proposed increase, set to go into effect in July if approved, as expected, by the New York City Water Board, would add $72 to the average water and sewer bill for a single-family home in the city. That would bring the average annual residential water bill to $699. Many apartments have water charges built into the rent, and co-ops and condos generally have them included as part of maintenance fees.

The double-digit increase comes several months after officials who run the water system said the city had more than $610 million in unpaid water bills. Uncollected bills have to be taken into account when new rates are calculated.

Officials attributed last year’s 9.4 percent rate increase to higher costs for fuel, insurance and financing, as well as to “deadbeat homeowners” and others who do not pay their water bills.

Although the number of water accounts in arrears remains high, officials said that the proposed rate increase, reported in The Daily News yesterday, had more to do with soaring costs for fuel, health care and supplies than with uncollected bills.

“We are working very hard to address that and hopefully, over time, improved collections will have a moderating effect on rate increases, but the needs of the system still dictate an increase of this magnitude,” said Anne Canty, deputy commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, which runs the water system. “That’s not to say that we are not pursuing outstanding accounts receivable. We are.”

Ms. Canty said that overdue accounts had dropped to $580 million from $610 million, and that significant progress had been made in collecting long-overdue bills.

But Councilman James F. Gennaro of Queens, chairman of the Environmental Protection Committee, said the Water Board was raising rates substantially without insisting that more be done to collect outstanding water bills. “It seems to me that before you can even dare to go to double-digit land, you’ve got to decide what are we doing about the amount of people who don’t pay bills,” Mr. Gennaro said.

An examination of the city’s water records last year by The New York Times revealed that 21,000 of the city’s 828,000 water accounts had made no payments at all for at least two years, while thousands more were in arrears for shorter periods.

Officials said the city had not moved to shut off service to any delinquent residential customers because its records were so unreliable that it could not prove that the unpaid bills were accurate.

At a Council hearing in December, Commissioner Emily Lloyd of the Department of Environmental Protection testified that an effort was under way to revamp the billing system and clear up the huge backlog of unpaid bills.

Since then, outside consultants have reviewed the department’s operations and will issue recommendations in June, Ms. Canty said. The department is redesigning water bills to make them easier to read, and it has instituted a system to let customers pay their bills online.

The department plans to ask the City Council for authorization to hold separate lien sales for properties with delinquent water bills, a request the Council has repeatedly denied.

The department did have the ability to attach water liens onto property tax lien sales. But when that provision recently expired, the city was unable to collect about $20 million that it had expected this year. Ms. Canty said, however, that that loss did not have any impact on the amount of the proposed rate increase this year.

The new water rates will be discussed at a series of five public hearings this month: April 24 in Brooklyn and Queens; April 25 in the Bronx and Staten Island, and April 26 in Manhattan. The locations are available on the Department of Environmental Protection Web site, nyc.gov/dep, by pressing “news” on the opening screen and then “public notices” on the next.

In another matter facing the city’s vast water system, officials are awaiting a decision by federal environmental officials, possibly this week, on whether the city will be forced to build an $8 billion filtration plant to treat much of its drinking water supply.

New York is one of the few major cities in the country that is exempt from federal laws requiring all surface drinking water to be filtered. Ninety percent of the city’s drinking water comes from the Catskill Mountains and the upper Delaware River, more than 125 miles away. The water has long been considered clean enough to be consumed without being filtered.

But federal officials have recently expressed concern about the impact on the water of increasing development inside the upstate watershed and stubborn problems with turbidity, or cloudiness, in certain upstate reservoirs.

(Source: NY Times)