Open letter to District of North Vancouver council:
My family was dismayed to read in the North Shore News that the price of water and sewer service is going to go up about 10 per cent next year. This means that for us it will probably go up 15 per cent.
Some years ago we ill-advisedly confessed to having a second kitchen in our house, and since then we have been exorbitantly overcharged for water.
Using Humpty Dumpty-ish reasoning, you declared the one-room kitchen to be a suite, and started charging our three-person family almost 50 per cent more than our neighbours who may have four children - including teenagers, who notoriously take lengthy showers - but only one kitchen.
We assumed that your premise was that the imaginary tenants of this non-suite would use lots of water, but, even so, having no bathroom facilities, they would make little use of sewer services. But no, it turned out that it's not people who are deemed to be using extra water, but that the "kitchen range" (which we take to mean "stove," a unit combining cooktop and oven) is the offender. We know this because we were told that if we were to take the range out and remove the connections for it, the "suite" and its non-existent tenants would just disappear (although of course the room would still be a kitchen, having cabinets, sink, dishwasher, microwave etc.), and so would our requirement to pay for services which we do not, and cannot, use. In fact, if a range is the same as a stove, maybe we don't have one after all, as the cooktop and the oven are separated by the width of the kitchen. We're not sure which is supposed to use water - the cooktop or the oven?
The bylaws state that we may ask to have a water meter installed, and so we did this a year or two ago. We hoped that if we had one we'd have to pay only for what we actually use, which is probably a lot less than the average. There are only the three of us, and we collect rainwater to use in the garden so that we use our sprinklers as little as possible. But you told us that you have no official rate for domestic water consumption, so you would have to charge us commercial rates, and therefore we'd pay just as much as we do now.
At the time I enquired, I was told that as the price of water ever increases, you might eventually consider installing water meters in the district. It hasn't happened yet, but we think that now the time has certainly come. Basing the water service charges on the number of kitchens in the house - or even the number of bathrooms, or perhaps the size of the house - is unfair and makes no sense. Water is used by individuals, not by rooms and not at all by kitchen ranges, so charging according to family size would be a more logical approach if for some reason you don't want to use meters.
What could that reason be? There is no better way to apportion the charges. Even if we had to pay for the meter to be installed, we know that with one (and an appropriate domestic rate) we'd pay a lot less for our water and sewer services than we do now.
Please will you consider this.
Cherry Rowlands North Vancouver
