Cutting Water Usage in Kingston

Letter to the Editor, Kingston Whig-Standard

The article, “City considers cutting water usage, June 5, 2007”, reports that the City of Kingston is considering how to reduce water consumption by 15%. I would support a higher price of water as a means of encouraging less usage. Indeed, as the article states, residential customers pay a higher rate (65 cents versus 52 cents per 1000 litres) if their monthly consumption exceeds 25,000 litres. However what the article did not say is that (according to the Utilities Kingston website) commercial customers pay a lower rate if their consumption exceeds 50,000 litres (39 cents versus 52 cents per 1000 litres). Surely the wrong message is being sent here.

It’s easy to check online that people who live in dry places like Arizona or Alberta pay, on average, about twice what we do for drinking water. If we and all of our neighbours around the Great Lakes could charge ourselves that much for drinking water, I think it would lend a lot of credibility to our claim that Great Lakes water is too valuable to be siphoned off to the rest of the continent.