To members of the Menlo Park City Council:
I wanted to bring a serious issue to your attention and ask that you have your staff confirm if my understanding of the City’s water rate structure, which penalizes multi-family dwellings such as condominiums and apartments with a tier-rate structure that doesn’t account for how many families are served by a single meter, is accurate.
As condo owners of the Sharon Glen Condominium understand from our board, the City’s rate structure is based on water usage of a single-family home. A single-family home uses 12 ccf of water in a month and the tier-rate structure will have the home owners pay the lowest Tier-1 rate for the first 6 ccf and Tier-2 rate for the second 6 ccf. This allows a family in a single-family home to be able to use 150 gallons of water a day under the Tier-1 rate and another 150 gallons under the Tier-2 rate before paying for an expensive Tier-3 rate which I assume is to encourage water conservation.
While I agree wholeheartedly that water is a precious resource that we should all do our part to conserve, the City’s new rate structure penalizes condo owners and apartment renters, residents that are far less affluent than owners of single-family homes and as a group typically uses far less water per capita than single-family home owners.
This is how the penalty works - the Sharon Glen Condominium has 57 units and only one water meter. When the meter registers 6 ccf for Tier-1, each family would only be allocated 2.6 gallons of water at the Tier-1 rate compared to 150 gallons for a family in a single-family home. When my family uses more than 5.2 gallons of water per day, the rest of our water usage is charged at the highest new Tier-3 rate of $8.69 per ccf. This means everyone who lives in a multi-family dwelling has to basically pay the highest rate for water usage in the City of Menlo Park.
I respectfully ask that you consider the consequences of approving the proposed new water rates that penalize working families living in multi-family dwellings in the City of Menlo Park even more than before. For the new water rate structure to work equitably for all citizens of Menlo Park, the number of units for each multi-family dwelling has to be accounted for in the water rates.
Sincerely,
Angela Cheung
Owner of a condo in Sharon Glen Condominium
Sharon Road, Menlo Park
