Water, sewer rates another fine mess
It’s another fine mess the Worcester County Commissioners have gotten themselves into, and now they have little choice but to make another mess getting out of it.
That mess would be the millions of dollars in debt on the books in some of county’s water and sewer district accounts, which are legally required to break even as “enterprise funds.”
Enterprise funds, for those who haven’t heard those words repeated hundreds of times in the past several weeks, are independent accounts governments use to track the finances of operations that sell services to the public and are run like standalone businesses. Like sanitary districts, for instance.
The problem here is that the user fees the county charges haven’t come close to covering the costs in some districts, and now the commissioners want every customer in every district to cover this debt. This is even though service areas such as Ocean Pines have kept their accounts current and have had nothing to do with other districts’ difficulties.
Ocean Pines residents and officials are, understandably, upset by the prospect of having to pay higher sewer and water rates to fix somebody’s else’s problem. The Ocean Pines voting districts’ two commissioners are howling about it as well, but from the point of view of the five other commissioners this one-for-all, all-for-one approach makes sense.
They don’t answer to Ocean Pines voters and therefore face little political risk by tapping into its large base of sanitary service users to reduce the amount owed by sewer and water customers in the areas they do represent.
It’s pretty simple — and wholly unfair. Nevertheless, there are no politically or financially harmless ways to repay this debt, because the customers in some service areas are too few or financially less able to pay for the services they receive.
If each service area has to pay for its own usage, as has been proposed, not all of them are going to make it. And then, exceptions will have to be made, and tax dollars spent to make up the difference.