Jersey City residents attempting to manage skyrocketing rents, higher grocery and gas prices and an increase in municipal taxes have a new expense to deal with: a 7% increase in water and sewerage fees.
The city’s autonomous Municipal Utilities Authority (MUA) voted Thursday to approve the new fee that increases the average water bill from $33.25 to $35.58 and the average sewerage bill from $45.85 to $49.06 — a total yearly increase of $66.50.
Officials at the MUA did not respond to a request for comment on the rate hike, but in an interview on Jersey City City Council President Joyce Watterman’s local cable TV show, MUA Executive Director Jose “Joe” Cunha blamed the increase on costs associated with the city’s 2011 lawsuit settlement with the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
“This is a very expensive undertaking, a consent decree, a mandate,” he said, referring to the MUA promising to resolve Clean Water Act violations by for failing to properly operate and maintain its combined sewer system. The MUA agreed to invest more than $52 million in repairs and upgrades to its infrastructure and pay a civil penalty of $375,000.
Cunha said the scope of the job is 10 times larger that initially anticipated and “we anticipate that we have already committed in the consent decree $1.5 billion in expenditures.”
He noted in the interview Hudson Media Group-produced show that the MUA has had three rate increases, totaling 14%, over the past 5 years and that this increase was delayed more than two years.
“The 7% increase on single-family dwellings equates to a 20 cents per day,” Cunha told Watterman. “... As time goes on the cost goes up. (The) 7% increase is promulgated by inflation over the past three, four years.”
The MUA is taking on an additional $400 million in debt to fund its major projects such as the infrastructure upgrades mandated by the EPA settlement.
“We will start paying it next year annually for 30 years,” Cunha said. “That’s on top of what we have already been paying for years.”
Cunha mentioned the $280 million cost of replacing lead lines, but he did not mention that the state and federal government has promised to subsidize and offer forgivable loans to pay for the project,
The MUA last year entered into a $50 million, 40-year deal with the city to continue operating and collecting revenue for water and sewerage operations. The contract, which runs through 2063, includes an initial payment of $30 million, then $10 million in 2025 and again in 2026.
These funds are separate from the annual $23 million the MUA has paid as part of a 22-year agreement, which expires in 2027.
