Photo by PoPville flickr user Pablo Raw

The following was written by by Robert Robinson Chair, DC Consumer Utility Board. PoP-Ed. posts may be written about anything related to the District and submitted via email to princeofpetworth(at)gmail please include PoP-Ed. in the subject line.

Ed. Note: DC Water has tweeted: “Each of our customers pays the Impervious Area Charge (IAC) on their bill. Here’s the history behind it.”

“For years DC’s Combined Water and Sewer (CSS) system spewed sewerage into the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers and Rock Creek during heavy storms or snowmelts.

For years, beginning in the 1980s, my DC water bills informed me that I was paying charges to replace the CSS.

I doubt that any of that work was done before 2005.

Now there’s hell to pay.

Low-, middle-, and fixed-income families, senior citizens, churches and nonprofit organizations, and small businesses are paying the lion’s share of the clean-up costs–with ever-rising water bills.

So, kudos to NBC4 Investigative Reporter Jodie Fleischer for for shining a light on DC Water rates that threaten to drive residents off of their property.

At the heart of the problem is D.C. Water’s $ 2.6 billion system to stop the Combined Sewer System’s overflows from contaminating the Anacostia and Potomac Rivers and Rock Creek, by containing the effluent in a mammoth two-tunnel system and sending it to DC Water’s 153-acre Blue Plains wastewater treatment facility.

The system is funded by the Impervious Areas Charge (IAC) under a Clean Rivers Project created by a 2005 Consent Decree.

But why does St. Paul’s Rock Creek Parish Church cemetery — thick with trees and graves and few impervious roads — pay a $200,000 impervious Area Charge annually, comparable to the $209,000 paid by the Washington, DC Nationals Stadium?

It’s not like the cemetery’s dead are producing stormwater runoff, drinking water, showering, flushing toilets and doing laundry at the rate of a 44,000-seat stadium that operates 19 parking lots. Read More