St. Paul passed utility bylaw for new water & sewer rates

The Town of St. Paul passed its new Water and Sewer Bylaw, which will add a fee to help build up reserves for future infrastructure projects.

Second and third reading of this utility bylaw were passed at the July 8 meeting.

“Building for the future, it’s our responsibility,” said Mayor Maureen Miller. 

“We need to plan for future, and it would be amiss of our council not to have considered that, knowing that federally and provincially those funds aren’t being filtered down to us as they have in past. It would really be an unfortunate situation for the community not to have some reserves sitting there for that emergency or whatever that plan would be.” 

This will mean the bills will increase, but the breakdown of the costs will be shown on the ratepayer’s bills.

Municipal infrastructure spending from the province of feds has been uncertain in recent years.

There used to be the Municipal Sustainability Initiative. Now it’s become the Local Government Fiscal Framework. But the variability in these grant dollars means the Town of St. Paul wants to manage that risk and prepare to fill their reserves to use when they need to.

“We do rely heavily on grants in order for us to get those projects through. So, not all municipalities, they might have more funds based on linear taxation that they have. Our community just doesn’t have that. Right. So that’s why it’s different from other communities. When people look at that savings, basically savings, our municipality is quite limited to where those resources of our tax resources can come in. So that’s why we may be different.”

The rates are listed in this bylaw.