Watermark > Spring 2002 > Features: Full Cost Pricing, Accounting for Water and Sewage Services Contained in New Safe Water Legislation Introduced in Ontario

Features

• Drinking Water Protection: Where are we at?—Rick Corbett, BCWWA President
• Fire Hydrants: Life Safety and Life Threatening?—Doug Dolan, Cross Connection Control Chair
• Dewaterability of Thermophilically Digested Biosolids—Jim Zhou, Don Mavinic, and Harlan Kelly
• Full Cost Pricing, Accounting for Water and Sewage Services Contained in New Safe Water Legislation Introduced in Ontario
• New Arsenic Limit of 10 Parts Per Billion Now Law in USA
• Protection of Drinking Water ‘to increase’—Scott Simpson
• Tenth Anniversary of The Rice Cake Race

Full Cost Pricing, Accounting for Water and Sewage Services Contained in New Safe Water Legislation Introduced in Ontario

Legislating full cost pricing and accounting for municipal water and sewage services is the best way to protect public health and our environment according to the Ontario Sewer and Watermain Construction Association, which applauded the provincial government’s introduction of the Sustainable Water and Sewage Systems Act, 2001.

Full cost accounting is a method for enumerating all the costs, both operational and capital, associated with water and sewage services. Full cost pricing is a method whereby all the costs of supplying water and sewage services are built into the water rates.

Sam Morra, OSWCA’s Executive Director congratulated the province for taking the first important steps towards making full cost accounting and full cost recovery for water and sewage services mandatory: “These policies will make our water and sewage systems financially and environmentally sustainable by ensuring that we can pay for day-to-day operations and, for the first time, that money is dedicated to the maintenance, repair and replacement of these vital systems.”

“Full cost pricing and accounting practices are ideas whose time has come,” Morra added. “Like it or not, we face a clean water deficit in this province. We need this safe water legislation to protect public health and our environment and to help prevent another Walkerton from happening here in Ontario.” Morra says that the past 15 years have marked a dramatic deterioration in the condition of Ontario’s water and sewage infrastructure for three reasons:

• governments at all levels have not invested enough money to maintain and renew the system;
• many municipalities have deferred underground water and sewage investments in favour of more visible investments; and
• there exists a chronic municipal practice of under-charging for water and sewage services.

A PricewaterhouseCoopers report commissioned by the association earlier this year by OSWCA confirms that we pay on average 30% less than the actual cost required to supply clean water and sewage services. The report also concluded that the system is not sustainable at current rates. “By closing the gap between the true costs to provide these services and our current clean water deficit, we can protect the safety and quality of our drinking water and our environment.”