Same Water, Higher Bill

If you live in an apartment, a condo or a mobile home park in Pinedale County Water District, you may be paying more for water than a single-family home on a comparable lot. It depends on how spread out your property is. The district’s multi-family charge includes a surcharge on the property’s total square footage, so a mobile home park or a low-rise condo complex, with its roads, parking, clubhouse, pool and laundry, pays more per home than a denser apartment building. Here are the numbers, using a park whose bills a constituent shared with me as the example. The rate studies are posted on the Rate studies page at pcwdinfo.com.

What the bills show

Single-family homes pay a flat monthly water rate based on lot size: $31.59 for lots up to 5,000 square feet, $33.73 for 5,001 to 7,000 square feet, and up from there.

Multi-family properties are billed differently. They pay $24.05 per unit, plus a surcharge of $4.07 for every 1,000 square feet of the whole property, including internal roads, parking and common areas.

San Joaquin Village, a 196-unit mobile home park, shows how that adds up. Its October 2026 water charges were $4,713.80 in per-unit charges plus $4,415.95 in surcharge: $9,129.75, or about $46.58 per home. That’s nearly the $48.20 a single-family home pays on a lot of more than 17,000 square feet. The district bills the park for about 1,085,000 square feet, an average of about 5,535 square feet per home. A single-family home with a lot that size pays $33.73. That is about $12.85 a month less, a difference of roughly 38 percent.

In December 2012, the same park’s bill had no surcharge at all. The surcharge appears in the 2021 rate study, without an explanation of how it was set (see the next post).

What’s being proposed

In September the district’s rate consultant, LT Municipal Consultants, presented a plan to raise rates about 18 percent on Jan. 1, 2027, then 9.5 percent a year. Applied evenly, that would keep the gap in place.

After directors were asked for direction on the study, I sent the general manager and the consultant the San Joaquin Village numbers. On Oct. 22 the consultant replied with three proposals: bill mobile home customers the same rates as single-family customers (she noted most mobile home lots are about 3,500 square feet, the lowest bracket), keep the multi-family rate only for higher-density apartment buildings, and eliminate the surcharge. The revised study is expected at the Nov. 19 board meeting.

I deep-dived into the proposed rate structure and worked through the numbers, then brought these findings to the board. The consultant has said they will bring a revised proposal and options to the board for review at the next meeting.

Stepping back

California’s Proposition 218 requires that a water charge not exceed the proportional cost of serving each property. A mobile home park connects to the district’s system at a single point; the pipes, roads and parking inside the park are the owner’s to build and maintain, not the district’s. I have not seen anything in the district’s records showing that serving a home in a park costs more than serving a house on a similar lot.

The consultant’s proposals would go a long way toward fixing this. The board still has to adopt them, and the Proposition 218 notice and hearing come after that.

There is one more wrinkle. Under Proposition 218, a protest from more than half of the affected parcels stops a rate increase. The district bills each mobile home park as one account, and there are six of them, so six votes stand for every household in those parks. San Joaquin Village, for example, is billed for 196 units, while only 163 of its spaces appear on the voter roll. Across the six parks, voter records show more than 560 households, so that figure is a floor. Owners can generally pass water charges through to residents, so the residents who pay the bill get no notice and no vote.

Apartment, condo and townhome complexes add more households on top of that. Voter records show more than 650 apartments, condos and townhomes across more than 140 addresses. This increases the number of customers who pay for service but don’t typically get a direct vote either.

Dutcher’s Take

As someone who has lived in both multi-family housing and a single-family home in this district, and paid the utilities in both, I’ll say it plainly: many multi-family residents have been paying more for the same water than a neighbor on a bigger lot across the street. According to the district’s 2021 rate study, multi-family homes are more than half the district’s households. Yet at the Oct. 7 board meeting, when I raised the gap, the board president noted that it had never come up in previous rate study discussions, and that no one from multi-family housing had served on the board before.

I think nobody at the table was paying these bills, so nobody asked. Now someone is asking. On Nov. 19, the board can adopt rates that charge every home by the same rules. I’ll be looking for that.