Water Access Card – Submissions due 4 pm 22 Nov

Email submissions to council@armidale.nsw.gov.au Anyone who wants to make a submission is welcome to use the information below.

ARC filling station abuse - partly because Uralla charges more for bulk water

ARC’s water filling stations charge less than Uralla’s $5/kL bulk water fee. Residents of Arding and Invergowrie currently save money by buying ARC’s water, compared to that from their own council. This might partly explain the abuse.

An access card will alleviate the problem - but a $10 card fee and $5/kL water charge is a better option than slugging rural residents with a hefty $100 card fee. A similar sum could be raised without, as noted in the Armidale Express, hitting the “all but empty” hip pocket of rural residents. Rural ratepayers have already borne the cost of obtaining suitable containers to transport water, and also will have to pay in advance for what they use. Spreading the cost of the card over several months is much a kinder alternative.

Simplest solution

Council needs a speedy solution to prevent continued abuse. One possible way to solve ARC’s current difficulty is to give rural residents a choice of paying an initial cost of $10 then $5/kL for water, or paying $100 for the card and $3.90/kL for water. These options could be put on public exhibition and adopted after 28 days if there are no objections.

As noted below, $5 per kL is substantially less than the $7/kL everyone might have to pay if effluent from the sewage treatment plant is needed as a source of water for commercial use, or ARC has to raise the Malpas dam wall. Council plans to review all water charges, but reviews take time. There are good reasons for taking advantage of this opportunity to encourage water conservation and bring ARC more into line with the NSW Government’s Guidelines for Best Practice Management of Water Supply.

Rewarding those who do the right thing - cheaper than $65 million to raise the dam wall?

The graph below shows Malpas Dam levels to 20 November 2019. Apart from 3 years from 2011, 2012 and 2017, there were't many years when the dam was full. This suggests there might be little benefit of spending $60 million on raising the dam wall (or even the $3.5 million of ratepayers' money investigating the possibility of adding to Malpas' capacity).

Cheaper, fairer & more sustainable to reward those who do the right thing

Everyone agrees we need to investigate need new supplies, but this will increase water prices. A sewage recycling plant will cost an estimated $43 million just for commercial reuse, about $7/kL if water is picked up at the sewage treatment plant – a lot more for potable water. Raising the Malpas Dam Wall is likely to cost about $60 million, i.e. about $7,000 per household. Water charges will have to increase to cover the additional costs (including depreciating the cost of new infrastructure).

Rewarding residents who do the right thing will likely be the cheapest, most sustainable way of safeguarding water supplies, especially in the short to medium term. It encourages conservation and would allow council more time to investigate the best ways to manage the risk of running out of water.

This can be done by increasing the price per kL, but reducing the connection charge so that those who do the right thing (and use water sparingly) save money. This should happen now at the filling stations, and later for other domestic users when charges are reviewed.

Everyone benefits. The more direct link between costs and consumption provides a greater reward for doing the right thing, e.g. using grey water on the garden. Consumption will fall, so ARC might need to spend less on infrastructure that, as noted above could result in price increases to $7 a kL.

Petrol buyers pay the same rate per litre – there’s no additional charge to cover the cost of the infrastructure. The cost is instead incorporated into the unit charge.

According to NSW’s Guidelines for Best Practice Management of Water Supply, charges should be based on the long-run marginal cost of water supply, which as noted above might amount to $7 a kL.

A complete review of water charges will take some time, but it is clear that a simpler system, e.g. abolishing the charge for connection to the pipes, or reducing it to a nominal $10 (the same as the water access card), and charging everyone the same (e.g. $5/kL, instead of the current system with 6 different charges for residential users depending on consumption) will create a much simpler, easier-to-understand system that encourages water saving, rewards residents for doing so, allows ARC to meet the NSW Government’s Guidelines for Best Practice Management, reduces the risk of running out of water in the short to medium term, and in the long term, might reduce the price we all have to pay for water by avoiding some of the substantial costs of finding new supplies