Fort Worth, area cities will spend less on water. Will they pass savings on to you?
Fort Worth and other Tarrant County cities will be able to buy their raw water supply at a lower rate next year, but it is unclear if those cities will pass the savings on to customers.
The Tarrant Regional Water District, which sells raw, untreated water to 30 customers like Fort Worth, Arlington and Mansfield, refinanced debt this month and saved about $55 million. The savings will allow the water district to charge those customers about $1.7 million less each year through 2052, said Sandy Newby, the district’s finance director.
Whether that savings is passed on to customers is up to each city.
“In a perfect world, if nothing else changes, it could be less on a water bill,” Newby said.
City water departments say that with the possibility of a rate hike from TRWD, it’s unclear if they’ll see savings.
For the city of Fort Worth, the savings comes to about $1.03 million a year based on 2020 usage estimates. Fort Worth buys about 60% of the water district’s raw water supply.
It’s too early to know what that $1 million savings will mean for Fort Worth’s water department, said spokeswoman Mary Gugliuzza. The department has a more than $500 million budget this year and is in the early stages of planing the 2021 budget.
At the beginning of the year, Fort Worth raised the base water rate for residential customers by 7 cents to $2.19 to offset the cost of improving and expanding water infrastructure around the city.
“Of course anything we can save is good,” Gugliuzza said.
The city of Arlington, the water district’s second largest customer, would save around $293,000 per year. The Arlington utility department said in an email that the savings might help the department save on projects to replace aging water lines.
Another major TRWD customer is the Trinity River Authority, which supplies water to 60 cities in the Trinity River basin. Bedford, Colleyville, Euless, Grapevine and North Richland Hills receive Tarrant Regional Water District water through the Trinity River Authority. If at the end of the year, the cost of providing water to those cities is less than what they paid, TRA will pay them back, spokeswoman Vanessa Joseph said.
The $55 million savings does not affect Tarrant Regional Water District’s property tax rate. The savings comes from refinancing debt in its revenue budget. That budget totals $154 million in 2020, of which about $82 million is debt.
Think of it like refinancing a home loan. When the water district issued debt in 2012, interest rates were higher than today. The district planned to save about $30 million by refinancing this year, but saved $55 million, Newby said.
This story was originally published February 21, 2020 at 5:30 AM.
