Three people asked the Fayetteville Public Works Commission on Wednesday to consider efforts to mitigate plans to increase water and sewer service prices an average of 10.9% over the next two years.
And other people submitted written comments about the proposal.
After listening to and reading the public’s comments, the board of the PWC — the city-owned utility which supplies water, sewer and electricity service to Fayetteville and surrounding areas — voted 4-0 to raise the water and sewer rates and fees 5.5% on May 1 and another 5.4% on May 1 next year.
“I always hate a rate change. I always hate it,” PWC Commissioner Richard King said after he voted for the increase. Not only because King doesn’t like to pay more, he said, but “I hate it for the community, and I hate that it happened. But it’s the cost of doing business, unfortunately.”
Separately, the PWC’s electricity prices are scheduled to rise 2% on May 1. That increase was unanimously approved a year ago. It will be partly offset by a $2 per month reduction in bills that has been charged for years to pay for Duke Energy’s cleanup of coal ash from its generation plants following a massive coal-ash spill in 2014. The PWC purchases most of its electricity from Duke.
With the new water rates and fees, a residential customer whose bill has been $81.62 for 4,000 gallons of water will pay $84.87 for 4,000 gallons starting May 1, and $88.12 starting May 1, 2026, according to a PWC document.
Residential prices on a per-gallon basis are not rising, but standard monthly fees are. Business customers will pay more per gallon plus have higher monthly fees.
The PWC commissioners were told this month that rising costs of building and maintaining the water and sewer system are driving the rate increase. This includes the construction of $111.2 million filtration plants to extract PFAS “forever chemicals” from drinking water supplies, expansion of service into areas that were annexed into Fayetteville, and expansion of the Rockfish Creek sewer treatment plant, listed in 2024 at $157.4 million.
While the PWC is facing these pressures, customers said the rate increase will put pressure on their budgets.
What the public thinks of the price increase
Ron Ross of Gray’s Creek praised the PWC, but said the Chemours Co. and its predecessor Dupont, which built a chemical factory that contaminated the Cape Fear River and southern Cumberland County with PFAS, should be forced by Fayetteville’s mayor and city council to pay the cost of building the PFAS filter system.
“If one cent of the citizens’ money is used to pay for this filtration system — I know it will be — but if one cent is used to pay for this, then next election, I think that we need to send a message to the mayor and city council. And the word is: You’re fired.”
The PWC gets its water from upstream of the Chemours plant, so the PFAS in its water comes from cities, towns and factories further upstream of Fayetteville that discharge their wastewater into the Cape Fear basin, said Wade Fowler during the public hearing. Fowler is a former commissioner of the PWC and a former Fayetteville City Council member.
“I think there needs to be more pressure put in that direction, still, by the state, on getting those people who are creating the problem to take care of it,” he said. “’Cause it’s a whole lot cheaper for ’em to take care of it before they put it into the system, rather than try to get it out of the system, which is what we have to do.”
Fowler suggested that to ease the rate increase, the PWC should evaluate its capital projects and delay those that are less pressing.
Channing Perdue of the Lock’s Creek community east of the Cape Fear River said her neighborhood is prone to flooding. She asked that water retention towers or a retention lake be built to collect stormwater to ease the flooding.
As for the water and sewer price increase, Perdue asked for the commissioners to consider families with incomes and fixed incomes. “I know there are programs out there to help, but sometimes they need that money, and a lot of them have children,” she said.
The commissioners said they listened to the residents’ concerns.
“We take all comments very seriously, take them under advisement,” said Commissioner Ronna Rowe Garrett. She was on the other side of rate increases and tax increases before she joined the PWC board, she said. Since she joined the PWC board, she has found that the city council, the county Board of Commissioners and the PWC board “work very hard together to ensure that the right things are done for the same tax base,” she said.
“So if it’s not paid for in one way, it’s paid for in another. And it’s the same group of people that’s being taxed, or rates increased. And we certainly understand that,” Garrett said.
Senior reporter Paul Woolverton can be reached at 910-261-4710 and pwoolverton@cityviewnc.com.
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If that were the only rate increase it wouldn’t be so difficult to accept, but my mortgage insurance rates increased, natural gas rates increased, grocery costs increased, etc., etc.! It’s all extremely difficult to absorb!