Water Watch NYC

Everything you need to know about water in NYC.

Monthly Archives: June 2009


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Conservation or Economy?

At last Friday’s Water Board meeting, it was announced that the 6% drop in water consumption has increased to above 7%. While the DEP, Water Board and this blog have in the past attributed this reduction in water use to conservation, we would now like to explore the possibility that something else is going on here.

While we are sure that some of this reduction in consumption is due to conservation, the possibility was raised on Friday that more than just conservation may be at play here. As the economy continues to suffer and more and more businesses close their doors, it stands to reason that less water will be used. Therefore, it makes sense to say that this unprecedented drop in water consumption should not be entirely attributed to conservation, but some “credit” should go to the weak economy.

This makes the DEP’s job of predicting future water consumption extremely difficult. In the past, the DEP could safely predict an annual 1% drop in water consumption due to conservation. Now that the economic climate is affecting water consumption, the DEP must predict how much longer and to what degree consumption will continue to drop above and beyond the 1% per year figure. And when consumption starts picking up again, the DEP must predict how long it will take and how much consumption will increase.

In the past we have been hard on the DEP. I don’t mean to say that we won’t continue to be hard on them. Hopefully, our past and future criticism of the DEP will enable changes that benefit both New York residents and the DEP. But we do have to recognize that every now and then the DEP is thrown a curveball and we hope they continue to do their best to deal with those curveballs as they come.


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DEP Lays Out Specifics on Amnesty Program

We’ve been tracking the DEP’s new Denial of Access and Theft of Services regulations for a long time. The last thing the DEP told the public about these new regulations was that there’d be a 120-day amnesty period beginning July 1 during which time customers found to be stealing water and/or denying access will not pay the full amount demanded by the new regulations.

The DEP recently released the specific numbers that they intend to use during the amnesty program, and I must say, they are quite reasonable. The new regulations authorize the DEP to charge customers found to be stealing water and/or denying access for water consumption at the 90th percentile. The attributed consumption and charges are detailed in this post. (Be aware though, that since Fiscal Year 2010’s water rate increase was only 12.9% and not the originally announced 14%, the actual costs for this attributed consumption is slightly lower than is listed.)

During the amnesty period, customers are only going to be charged at the 50th percentile, which is the following for commercial properties:

Meter Size –       Annual Attributed Consumption Rate (Gallons per Year)

5/8″ and less                                                                                50,000
3/4″ or more and less than 1.5″                                                   80,000
1.5″ or more and less than 3″                                                    280,000
3″ or more and less than 4″                                                       550,000
4″ or more and less than 6″                                                    1,300,000
6″ or more and less than 8″                                                    2,300,000
8″ or more and less than 10″                                                  4,600,000
10″ or greater                                                                       38,000,000

and the following for residential units:

First Dwelling Unit                                                                         70,000
Each Additional Unit                                                                      60,000

In dollars, this comes to:

Meter Size –                                                          Annual Attributed Cost

5/8″ and less                                                                            $       452
3/4″ or more and less than 1.5″                                                        723
1.5″ or more and less than 3″                                                        2,530
3″ or more and less than 4″                                                           4,971
4″ or more and less than 6″                                                         11,748
6″ or more and less than 8″                                                         20,786
8″ or more and less than 10″                                                       41,572
10″ or greater                                                                            343,417

and:

First Dwelling Unit                                                                            $633
Each Additional Unit                                                                           542

I expressed my frustration when I thought it was too high; it would be unfair of me not to express satisfaction at these extremely reasonable figures.