HERMISTON, Ore.-The Hermiston City Council unanimously approved Resolution 2401, which adjusts water and sewer rates, as well as how industrial sewer customers are billed, at its regular meeting on January 12.
Hermiston’s utility rates are adjusted annually to ensure stable and predictable rates, avoiding large one-time increases, while maintaining the financial health of the City’s water and wastewater systems and keeping pace with inflation.
“This year’s proposed adjustment is 2.34 percent across the board for general water and sewer,” Mark Morgan, Hermiston’s Assistant City Manager told the Council. “Generally speaking, for your typical residential customer, that works out to an average of about $2.72 more a month.”
Annual adjustments to water and sewer rates that track inflation are based on the Engineering News-Record Construction Cost Index (ENR CCI), which reflects changes in construction-related costs such as labor and materials, according to the City.
Hermiston has used a three-year average of the ENR CCI to balance the impact of high and low inflation years to determine annual rate adjustments since 2021. The 2.34 percent increase will start showing up on customer’s bills March 1.
Resolution 2401 also affects how industrial sewer customers are billed for organic material in wastewater that directly affects operating costs at the treatment plant.
Columbia Basin Bioscience is the only industrial customer out of 6,000 that is billed under the industrial rate based on the average of multiple samples, according to Morgan.
The predictable sampling schedules of the current industrial rate may not reflect peak discharges, and rates paid by the industrial customer were not covering costs at the wastewater plant, according to the City of Hermiston.
Under Resolution 2401, industrial customers will now be billed on the highest sample collected each month, rather than an average, to align costs with system capacity requirements and prevent the cost of maintaining treatment capacity for industrial discharges from being passed along to other ratepayers.
The industrial billing changes approved under Resolution 2401 will not be implemented until January 1, 2027, to allow time for planning and any potential on-site treatment improvements.
