San Andreas, CA…A rate increase is among the most difficult tasks a water and wastewater agency must do. Especially one of this magnitude. CCWD has done everything within its power to control costs. We are fortunate to have incredibly talented staff who constantly seek ways to reduce costs while still providing safe and reliable service and maintaining compliance with ever-increasing regulatory requirements. We have also reduced the number of infrastructure projects that this rate increase will fund and limited our list to those that require immediate attention. Had we fully funded our Capital Improvement Program, we would have had to increase rates even more. In the past several years, CCWD has obtained millions in grants to cover some of our infrastructure projects. But despite these successful grant efforts and our cost-effective operations, our costs have increased dramatically due to circumstances beyond our control, especially over the last three years.

Click Above or Here for full details

We understand the impact rate increases have on our communities. All of our Directors and most of our staff are local to Calaveras County, many are CCWD ratepayers, and all of us care deeply about the communities we serve. We don’t want to impose additional financial burdens on our customers, but we also understand that our communities can’t function without the services we provide. We take that responsibility very seriously and we are committed to ensuring CCWD is able to provide the water and sewer services for years to come.

Some households will feel the impact of the increases more than others. While we would like to accommodate the different financial circumstances of our customers, we are not allowed to. Water agencies have very limited flexibility when it comes to rates and are not allowed to set different rates for different individuals or categories of customers, such as people on fixed incomes. We will work with partnering agencies, however, to help address financial hardship wherever we can.

There is no sugar-coating this – the proposed rate increases are significant. If there was a better alternative, CCWD would pursue it. But underfunding CCWD would ultimately cost our communities more than these proposed rate increases. We need a generational investment in our water and wastewater infrastructure, and we ask for your understanding.