Water utilities face trying times when communicating the need to increase rates to cover the increasing costs of operating water and wastewater utilities. The issues are complex. The public is constantly bombarded with news from their phones, TVs, computers, etc., and Board turnover can wipe-out years of institutional knowledge. Additionally, customers have a general distrust for water utilities. Perhaps it’s from a history of underpricing and a reluctance of water utilities to actively market themselves (i.e. the “silent service”). Or maybe customers see water rates as just another tax.
Tag: water utility finance (Page 3 of 10)
We wish to offer our sincere thanks to all of our wonderful partners, clients, and friends for all the great work you’ve allowed us to do together with you in 2013. We hope you had a wonderful winter holiday, and we look forward to an exciting year of helping organizations that provide environmental services become more financially sustainable in 2014! Continue reading
David R. Tucker is a Project Director at the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
My work at the UNC Environmental Finance Center frequently centers around the study, benchmarking, and understanding of rates, especially residential rates: charges per unit across time (such as dollars per kilowatt hour for kWh of electricity used in a month; or dollars per gallon, for thousands of gallons of drinking water used in a quarter; and so on). You can see the results of our work on rates by yours truly and my colleagues in sophisticated tools that we have developed, such as our drinking water and wastewater rates dashboards, our stormwater rates dashboards, and our electric rates dashboards, among many other tools and reports that the EFC has created. Continue reading
Mary Tiger is the Chief Operating Officer of the Environmental Finance Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Measurements, benchmarks, and metrics. We’re no stranger to them at the Environmental Finance Center. In fact, we’re fans. (Have you seen our dashboards?) Credit rating agencies are also big fans of metrics. But when assessing a utility’s credit worthiness, credit rating agencies look at more than metrics to inform their ratings. This subjectivity can be challenging for a utility that wants to make sure that it is in the best position to go out to the debt market, making sure all of their financial t’s are crossed and i’s are dotted. The following blog post summarizes some of the most commonly cited themes in a review of recent credit rating summaries for water utilities in the U.S.
Mary Tiger is the Chief Operating Officer of the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina.
Water is the talk of the town these days – or at least that is what a series of marketing campaigns are hoping. Lately, it seems that almost every water industry association around has a marketing campaign for water.