One year after rocking Falls residents with an almost 9% increase in their water rates, the Niagara Falls Water Board is ready to approve a 2024 budget that contains no increases in the cost of water or service.
“We’re holding the line on (water rates) and we’re not cutting any services,” Water Board Chair Nicholas Forester said. “Our staff has been exceptional at controlling expenditures and we have saved a tremendous amount of money (in 2023).”
The full board is expected to approve the $42 million spending plan for 2024 at its regular meeting Monday afternoon. The vote on the proposed operations and maintenance budget follows two years of water rate increases driven by, among other things, rapidly rising chemical costs.
“More than one-fifth of our annual budget is currently eaten up by the cost of chemicals that are essential to drinking and wastewater treatment. Our personnel costs have remained flat, but in recent years, chemical prices doubled or tripled from the prior year,” said Water Board Member Michael Asklar, who chairs the board’s Finance and Audit Committee.
Forester said that in 2017, the board paid 42 cents per gallon for chlorine, a critical chemical for the operations of the the city’s fresh water and wastewater treatment facilities. By 2022, the cost of chlorine had skyrocketed up to $2.17 per gallon.
“The NFWB is hopeful that the chemical market is beginning to stabilize, as there were no major increases in 2024 treatment chemical bid prices. This change, combined with cost-control measures such as careful management of overtime expenses, implementation of improved technology, and avoidance of excessive contractor mark-ups through more work completed ‘in house’ (hiring skilled labor from local union halls as temporary employees when necessary) has helped control overall expenses,” Asklar said. “The 2024 budget also forecasts modest increases in interest earnings and revenue from industrial users.”
Forester said the water board has been engaged in “unprecedented” efforts to used shared services with the city.
“We’ve had an excellent collaborative effort with the city,” Forester said. “We’ve shared equipment. When we needed some trees removed, the city’s Forestry Department was able to take care of that (as opposed to hiring an outside contractor).”
Asklar said the 2024 budget “begins to address some deferred maintenance expenses that were postponed over the past several years to reduce the total required rate increase.
“We’re continuing to invest millions of dollars in our infrastructure, and much of our capital spending is at the wastewater treatment plant, which was completed in 1977 and uses outdated treatment technology,” Asklar said. “Separately, our water treatment plant is now more than a quarter-century old and beginning to require capital investments as well. And we have over 500 miles of water and sewer lines to upgrade and maintain, some of which are nearly 100 years old.”
Forester has pushed aggressively for the construction of a new biological wastewater treatment plant. He has pegged the cost of constructing a state-of-the-art biological wastewater treatment plant at $250 million.