Water rate hike coming to Marana | News

Beginning in February, Marana residents will be spending more money on their water. Following a rate study by an outside consultant it was determined that Marana Water needs more cash to fund the maintenance and improvements to keep clean water flowing.

According to Marana Water Director Heidi Lasham, the increase is not about the Luckett Road North and South Data Center.

“None of this is relating to the data center; that wasn’t even a part of this,” she said. 

Keeping Marana water clean and flowing is no small task, and it requires plenty of attention and funds. Residents receive their water from one, two or three sources: ground water from local aquifers, Central Arizona Project (CAP) from the Colorado River and treated wastewater. Some residents get their water from just one source and others two sources or three sources. Lasham said a lot of Marana’s water comes from groundwater.

Running the show is Lasham, an experienced professional engineer and Envision Specialist. This means she holds a professional license that involves further study into “a system for evaluating and rating the sustainability, resilience, and equity of infrastructure projects,” according to its website. One of her specialties is working with water and wastewater.

The consultant was a company called Raftelis, which provides management expertise to local governments and utilities. They took into account several factors.

“They look at … our revenues and expenses on both water and wastewater,” Lasham said.

Among the categories they looked at were inflation and regulatory requirements. Maintenance also takes a bite out of the budget.

“Maintenance is a huge part of the equation,” she said.

Here’s why.

Right now, there’s a meter replacement program where the utility works to replace meters before they go out of service. Along with that Marana Water is now working to update the meters so “all of our residents can see their information relatively quickly, within moments, they can go onto their app and see if they have a leak,” Lasham said.

Every fiscal year Marana Water tries to rehab one of their five to seven wells, looking at how well it operates. They also do one reservoir rehab each year.

“Since those are tanks, we have to get divers who go in and they actually look for cracks or any inefficiencies inside,” Lasham said. “That’s how we figure out what it is we actually need to do for that next fiscal year. Those costs are included in the study.” 

Then there’s water reclamation, which includes manhole maintenance. 

“We put money in that every year to rehab some of our old manholes,” Lasham said. 

After the sewers are jet-cleaned, they run a closed-circuit camera through the pipes “and it videotapes the entire pipeline so that we can see if there are any inefficiencies or cracks. That’s how we create our program for the next year of what needs to be fixed.”

Water reclamation also includes maintenance and rehab work on the several lift stations Marana Water maintains. 

Of course, Marana Water also has to deal with pollution.

“The big elephant in the room is PFAs,” Lasham said.

Those are, according to epa.gov, “widely used, long lasting chemicals, components of which break down very slowly over time. Because of their widespread use and their persistence in the environment, many PFAS are found in the blood of people and animals all over the world and are present at low levels in a variety of food products and in the environment.”

Cleaning water of PFAs is mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency.

To that end, three of Marana’s wells — Airport NW Well, Marana Park Well and Pioneer Well — “are all slated, as part of this rate study, to get PFAs treatment at those water campuses,” Lasham said. A portion of this cleanup is included in the rate hike.

“A good thing to note is that the town is very big at growth pace per growth so if there’s a future project coming in that is not included in the rate study that would be taken care of by impact fees,” she added. Growth pace per growth refers to economic development over time.

“Those three wells, there’s a portion that’s in rates and there’s a portion that’s in impact fees,” she said. “Only existing customers that are getting water from those specific wells, that percentage is going into rates,” Lasham said.

These are just some of the pieces of Marana Water’s puzzle. Workers have to be paid, vehicles and equipment have to be maintained, and wastewater facilities have to be cleaned. The worst offender? So-called biodegradable wipes that are flushed.

“(Wipes) are probably our biggest hangup over at our water reclamation facility,” Lasham said. “We get a ton of those wipes. Are they biodegradable? At some point in time, they are but not from the time you flush your toilet to the time it gets to our facility. They do not biodegrade in that short period of time.”

They get screened out along the way and then disposed.

Mostly, what is important for Marana residents to know is that the town is not trying to overcharge people, or pay for anything but what is necessary to keep water clean and flowing into residents homes, Lasham said.

“The town works really diligently to make sure that we combed this from top to bottom and backwards to make sure that we are only raising rates in order to cover what we need for what we’re expecting to be in the next five years … that only what is needed for customers today is being charged to our customers today and that we really have their best interest in mind,” she said.