City passes increased water rates to pay for 4th street project

By Carrie Moritz, Gazette

            On Monday, the Garretson City Council voted to move ahead with the 4th Street project by way of approving the surcharges necessary to close out the SRF loans the state of South Dakota offered to the city to pay for the construction and infrastructure project.

            Those surcharges, which will be implemented in two steps, will be on top of surcharges already in place for the 3rd Street construction project.

            And at the same meeting, the council voted to raise the base rate of water and sewer by 3%, plus raised the usage rate 15% to account for the increase in rates given to the city by Minnehaha Rural Water.

            Between all of this, it means residents' utility bills will be increasing in March, April, and October.

            It'll happen over those three months instead of all at once because the council voted to implement the new surcharges in a stepped-rate fashion upon the suggestion of City Finance Officer Paetyn Dreckman and Mayor Greg Beaner.

 In early 2022, the council had agreed to raise the base rates by 3% each year to keep up with costs, rather than holding back and then having to jump rates by a large amount in preparation for the upcoming infrastructure construction. Then, this year, the bulk water costs jumped 15%.

            "The 3% increase each year on the base rate for water and sewer [was] to keep up with inflation," Dreckman told the council. "But this year, the big thing that we saw from water and sewer was a 15% increase on our bulk water."

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