 Differential Water Rates
TUCSON, ARIZONA- May 6, 2025 – The Pima County Board of Supervisors continued my proposed Differential Water Rate Resolution from our last meeting because there was some thought that members of the Board might have amended language to offer to call for a broader conversation about how we use water in our region. I was and continue to be willing to have those discussions. What I am unwilling to do is to change any of the language in this resolution that points out how inherently discriminatory and unfair it is for the City of Tucson to target one set of their ratepayers.
Tucson Water receives the lion’s share of our residential and industrial allocation of Central Arizona Project water. The reason for that is because the utility set a service area many years ago that ranges from Corona de Tucson to Catalina. A third of their ratepayers live in the unincorporated county and are represented in each one of the five supervisor districts. Most of these folks have been Tucson Water customers for decades. While it is true that municipal utilities around the state sometimes charge higher rates to those who live outside city limits, it would be unprecedented for those higher rates to be levied on longtime ratepayers representing such a sizable chunk of the customer base.
Let me use the composition of District 1 to point out the contrived and purposeful nature of Tucson Water’s proposal. The people I represent live mostly in portions of the unincorporated county, but my district also includes parts of Marana, Tucson and all of Oro Valley. If a holistic study of the costs of delivering water and maintaining the utility’s infrastructure were done, it is likely that it would be found that it costs more to serve some of the customers in those incorporated areas than it does to serve those in the unincorporated areas. However, customers in all incorporated areas are exempt from these higher rates.
Tucson Water’s proposed rate hike is not based on a comprehensive cost of service study. Instead, as can be seen by reading comments from city staff in the local media, they began with an end in mind: jacking up rates solely on their customers in the unincorporated county. With that goal, initially thwarted by our successful lawsuit, they cobbled together a methodology as a means to justify their end. It may ultimately pass legal muster, which is why they had both the City Attorney’s office and their paid consultants working on it, but that won’t make it right.
The ratepayers we represent in the unincorporated county have been disparagingly referred to as “non-owners” of the utility because they live outside the boundaries of the city. That is an insulting term to apply to your customers who have been helping the utility to grow and prosper for decades. It is equally insulting to infer that these higher rates mostly target the affluent. Again, the customers targeted for these higher rates represent a third of the people served by Tucson Water. They live and work in each one of our districts and they represent our entire population.
The city exempted the county as a ratepayer from their initial rate proposal in a cynical attempt to get the court to dismiss our lawsuit. The court saw what they were trying to do, allowed the lawsuit to continue and the county ultimately prevailed. We are also exempt from the higher rates in this proposal and the court did not allow us to represent our constituents as a class last time, so our direct legal options may be limited. However, this resolution will call on staff to support any other legal challenges to the new proposal and explore “all things necessary to support jurisdictional rate parity for Tucson Water customers.”
Part of the resolution our office has submitted for the Board’s consideration notes that “by adopting differential water rates, the City of Tucson will end its commitment to serve as a regional water provider but continue to maintain a monopolistic market for its unincorporated water customers who lack political representation through either the City of Tucson Mayor and Council or the Arizona Corporation Commission.” The people who live in unincorporated Pima County, who make up a third of Tucson Water’s ratepayers and who are over a third of the county’s population, have only one advocate: the Board of Supervisors. We need to continue to stand up for them, so I encourage my colleagues to pass this resolution.
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