Is your Houston water bill too high? A $2B EPA sewer mandate won’t help

Houston is facing a federal mandate to upgrade its embattled sanitary sewer system, stirring concerns among advocates and civic leaders that the estimated $2 billion bill — and the higher rates required to pay it — could overburden low-income families.

The average city sewer bill already exceeds what the Environmental Protection Agency considers affordable for more than 113,500 Houston families, Houston Public Works and Census Bureau data show. That could rise to more than a quarter of all Houston households if sewer costs increase by 19 percent.

Such a hike is unlikely to happen overnight, but the average city water bill has risen 17 percent in the last six years via annual increases for inflation alone.

Mayor Sylvester Turner has not said how much bills are expected to rise as a result of the consent decree, citing a pending rate study, but repeatedly has said costs will remain “well below” the EPA threshold.

Experts, however, say that guideline — which aims to keep annual sewer charges below 2 percent of the citywide median household income — has been “discredited” in large part because it obscures the burden on poor families.

In Houston, for instance, sewer charges could more than double and still remain below the EPA threshold. That is in part because the city’s rates today are modest: A 2017 American Water Works Association report ranked Houston’s average bills and their affordability roughly in the middle of the nation’s 25 largest cities.

“The intellectual case for using median household income as the exclusive determinant of affordability has collapsed,” said Tracy Mehan, AWWA director of government affairs. “What about the employment rate? What about the 50 percent of the population that’s ignored at median levels?”

Adam Krantz, CEO of the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, of which Houston is a member, agreed.

“There is really very little underpinning that 2 percent,” he said. “That being said, it’s what has driven consent decrees in virtually every major city across the country. This needs to be done on a more sensitive basis in terms of what really is affordable.”

Those critiques from the AWWA, NACWA and the U.S. Conference of Mayors feature prominently in a 2017 report Congress commissioned on the EPA’s affordability guidelines. The report authors recommended the EPA consider all water costs — rather than examining sewer or water costs in a vacuum — and that its criteria “focus on the income of low-income users most vulnerable to rate increases rather than Median Household Income.”

The report has EPA weighing whether to “modernize” its affordability criteria, a spokesman said Monday.

Turner has stressed that Houston residents would be facing far steeper rate hikes if the city had failed to negotiate the EPA down from an earlier proposal that would have required the city to spend $5 billion to curtail its chronic sewer spills.

Public Works Director Carol Haddock echoed that, and said the city secured a 15-year deadline rather than the 10-year schedule the EPA originally had sought in an effort to restrain rising costs for residents.

“As we move into this rate study, we’re going to explore every avenue available to minimize the impact on the most vulnerable in our communities,” Haddock said. “We’re really sensitive to the impact this might have … but we also need everybody to recognize that this is not optional. We cannot choose not to participate.”

Houston’s hundreds of sanitary sewage overflows each year — often caused by cracked, clogged or flooded pipes — contaminate streams in violation of the Clean Water Act, and drew the EPA’s attention nearly a decade ago.

Rather than enforce violations through a court fight, EPA initiated talks in the hopes of producing the “consent decree” now before city council. The agreement lists projects and procedures Houston must use to reduce spills by upgrading pipes, improving maintenance and educating the public on how to avoid clogging the city’s more than 6,200 miles of sewers, 384 lift stations and 39 treatment plants.

The council is scheduled to consider a vote on the decree on Wednesday.

Charles Noble said he expects word of rising water bills to cause residents in his Fontaine-Scenic Woods neighborhood to “act up.”

Most residents in that area of northeast Houston already pay more for sewer service than the EPA considers affordable, Census data show.

And there is evidence families there often must make difficult budgeting choices: More families had their water shut off for lack of payment in the 77016 postal code, where Noble lives, in the last year than anywhere else in the city.

“Housing, health care, all of those are major concerns for people here. Money is just tight all the way around,” said Noble, the area civic club president. “To hear that bills will go up, for people who are on fixed incomes that’s going to be a concern, I’m sure.”

The decree may lead to pipes in 77016 being repaired or cleaned more often, however, as city data show the area also struggles with sewer spills; Noble’s next-door neighbor got a visit from a city crew after reporting a blockage just last week.

Otis Myles, the civic club president in nearby Scenic Woods Plaza, is not optimistic.

“They come in and say, ‘The EPA told us to do it,’ and they never do it and then (rates) go up anyway,” Myles said. “But there’s not too much you can do about them not doing it but complain, and they don’t listen to you complain too much because, well, they own the water company.”

A 2016 Houston Chronicle analysis found that neighborhoods most likely to experience sewer spills were disproportionately home to low-income and minority residents, and 77016 matches that. The area — where 97 percent of residents are black or Hispanic and the median income is a third lower than the citywide figure — tallied the third-highest count of spills from 2009 to 2016.

“Separate and apart from the consent decree, we need to address SSOs (sanitary sewer overflows),” Turner said last week. “And there’s no question many of those SSOs are occurring in low-income, minority neighborhoods.”

Nonprofit leaders have urged the council, which delayed the vote one week to give members time to read the decree, to seek another delay to gather more public input.

“Can you tell us how the poorest communities will not be overburdened by the rate increase?” Iris Gonzalez, director of the Coalition for Environment, Equity, and Resilience (CEER), a group of 24 nonprofits, asked the council last week. “If not, then we’re not ready to vote.”

Gonzalez said Houston must move forward with the agreement, but should invite more public participation to ensure residents better grasp what they will be paying for.

“When we think about communities who are living in poverty,” she said, “it’s difficult to talk about a moderate or minimal rate increase in a vacuum, because it’s going to disrupt the web of vulnerabilities that a family is facing every day.”

Some council members have said they are uncomfortable with the lack of information about future rates, but say rejecting the settlement in favor of a court fight with the EPA seems foolish.

“They’ve got us over a barrel here. It’s not a bad agreement,” Councilman Mike Knox said. “But I think we need to be a little bit more transparent with the public about how much it’s actually going to cost them.”