Most residents’ water bills to go down next year after City Council approves SAWS rate adjustments

The City Council voted on Thursday to approve a San Antonio Water System (SAWS) rate readjustment that will result in a decrease in water bills for over 80% of residential customers starting in January.

The average residential customer will see a reduction in their monthly water bill of 8.7%, equivalent to $5.80, reducing the average bill to $60.88.

Eighty-three percent of residential customers will see a reduction of some kind.

The remaining 17% are residents who use over 9,000 gallons of water per month, and they will see a rate increase for water usage over that amount in order to disincentivize that high usage.

The new adjustment also created a separate rate structure for low-income residential customers utilizing SAWS’ discount program, Uplift, and rates for all of those customers are set to lower or stay the same — that includes 33%-57% decreases for essential water use.

Some of those rate decreases will be subsidized by a roughly 2% increased rate for irrigation customers.

District 8 City Councilman Manny Pelaez expressed his satisfaction with the rate adjustment proposal, and he congratulated individual SAWS members for their work.

“I think this is brilliant,” he said. “I can’t find a flaw in this.”

SAWS President and CEO Robert Puente said that while rates for the vast majority of residents are going down, rates for most of its “general” customers — typically businesses — will go up by 7%.

“Adjustments to meet the cost of service will result in a bill increase of 7% for most customers in this general class,” Puente said.

Despite the increased rates for businesses, Cacie Madrid, the vice president of public policy at the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce, said her organization was in favor of the rate adjustment.

“I am here on behalf of the San Antonio Chamber of Commerce to express our support for the 2023 San Antonio Water System rate advisory recommendations,” Madrid said.

The rate adjustment proposal also included rate increases for recycled and chilled water, used by some businesses and federal buildings, over the next five years.

Recycled and chilled water are used to reduce energy costs for some businesses and mitigate environmental effects.

Currently, all SAWS customers that do not use recycled or chilled water are subsidizing business’ ability to use them — the rates for using recycled water are only 33% of the actual cost of the system.

The rate increases through 2027 will make it so customers actually using recycled water are paying for 48% of the cost of the system by 2023 and 71% of the system’s cost by 2027.

District 9 Councilman John Courage walked through why the rate increase was still a good deal for the businesses that use recycled water.

“So people getting recycled water, even with these projected costs, would still be paying less than what the cost would be for delivering potable water,” Courage said.

For chilled water, which is only used by downtown businesses and federal buildings and Port San Antonio, SAWS proposed five rate increases, once per year, for the next five years.

A 12% increase in 2023 and 2024, a 10% increase in 2025, and then 8% increases in 2026 and 2027.

Puente said the rate increases were necessary to maintain and improve the chilled water system.

Even after these increases, Puente said customers will still be getting cheaper cooling for their buildings than they could get elsewhere.

“Even after five years — the 12-12-10-8-8 rate increase — we can still provide it a lot cheaper than a private sector could,” he said.

Closing out the agenda item before it was unanimously approved, Puente said he appreciated all the praise for the rate reductions, but he cautioned against too much praise.

“I will tell you that I’ve been in front of this podium — 10 out of the 13 years I’ve been at SAWS — asking for a rate increase,” Puente said. “I don’t want to just take those accolades. I do want to warn y’all that I may be back.”