Tag: water utility (Page 3 of 6)

Touching Down with Affordability of Water and Sewer Bills in Alabama

Football

It’s college football season again, and thoughts among many in the South, and elsewhere, turn to tailgating and touchdowns, hot dogs and sodas, field goals and fun. (Here in Chapel Hill, we like to remember alumnus Andy Griffith’s famous 1953 comical monologue about football, “What It Was, Was Football.”) Meanwhile, those of us at the UNC Environmental Finance Center (EFC) have completed our first-ever Alabama Residential Water and Wastewater Rates Dashboard, which, in fact, ties in with – you guessed it – football! (As well as tying in with the affordability of water and sewer bills by customers in Alabama, of course.) Continue reading

Even Total Water Demand is on the Decline at Many Utilities

Increasing Accounts, Declining Demands

Almost two years ago, we wrote a blog post revealing that average residential water use is declining in the State of North Carolina. Similar trends have also been identified in other states and across the country, driven by several factors. It turns out; it’s not just average residential water use that is declining. Despite growing service populations, many utilities have noticed that total demand is falling.

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Release of Revenue Resiliency Review for Water Utilities

Mary Tiger is the Chief Operating Officer of the Environmental Finance Center at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The water industry, just like any other, suffers from a variety of financial constraints and challenges. Over the last decade the water industry has endured myriad challenges that impact the most common business models, including a decrease in water demand, economic recession, increasing need for infrastructure replacement, growing stakeholder involvement and concerns, and extreme weather impacts. And while these issues are a concern for many, there is no universal list that encompasses the suite of financial issues each utility faces, and subsequently, there is no single “silver bullet” strategy for revenue resiliency.  There are, however, many lessons that can be learned in assessing how well a water utility’s business model has endured over the last decades and in investigating how those in the industry (and beyond) are thriving despite hardship. And that is just what the Environmental Finance Center, in partnership with Raftelis Financial Consultants, has been doing on behalf of the Water Research Foundation.

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Tap dancing around impact fees: Residential connection fees for drinking water and wastewater systems in GA and NC

David R. Tucker is a Project Director at the Environmental Finance Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

tap and impact fees 2

Key: 1. Water Main; 2. Water Tap; 3. Water Meter; 4. Private Plumbing (water line); 5. Private Plumbing (wastewater line); 6. Wastewater Main.
Source: City of Fort Worth, Texas

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

Effective Utility Management

faucet_web

Guest author Catherine Noyes is an Associate Consultant at Raftelis Financial Consultants.

Through the 1960s, the utility business was all about protecting public health – making sure that technology was in place to ensure safe and reliable water and wastewater service to a growing population.  In the 1970s, the focus on public health was expanded to include the environment.  The EPA was established, and the federal government enacted legislation to protect clean air and water.  With this legislation came large federal grants, which funded expansions to the nation’s water and sewer infrastructure. Continue reading

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