Basically it takes the volume of water it treats from its four water treatment plants and divides it by the number of people within the four cities of Porirua, Lower Hutt, Upper Hutt and Wellington. This is a dubious way to present individual water usage, as there are other significant components involved. When you strip out industrial usage, community usage, council usage and leakage the real figure is somewhere between 200 and 250 litres per person per day. This amount of usage is typical compared to cities within New Zealand as well as internationally.

So how will metering reduce usage by 20% to 40%.

It won’t, international research suggest that a saving of around 10% is realistic. The problem is this saving is an average usage over the year where the supply issue is down to peak demand in drought conditions. People are unlikely to conserve water when their plants are dying, just watch the WCC water like crazy over summer; there is a cost to replacing dead plants. People won’t save when water is so cheap; your water only costs you about $2 for 1000 litres (equivalent price to a 500 ml bottled water). Most people were paying over $2 for 1 litre of petrol ( a rise of over 50%) and consumption only fell a few percent. How much would water need to cost before people consider lowering their usage? The only way to get the price high enough for people to seriously conserve is to privatise the water so huge profits can be made.

So how much will the meters cost?

To get a council contractor to excavate in the footpath, install meter, meter box, new valve and pipework, you wont get much change out of $1000 to do the job. There are nearly 120,000 properties in the region that will need meters, this equates to approximately 120 million, not much less than a Dam. These mechanical meters also need to be read, maintained, billed and replaced every 5-10 years because the accuracy deteriorates over time.

We should also question the logic of having such limited amount of water storage in the region. International best practice suggests that allowing for a 1 in 200 year drought is prudent. Greater Wellington is currently only able to provide for water in a 1 in 30 year drought event. What will happen to the region in a 1 in 200 year event?, how long will we be without water for? Have they taken into account of what it will cost the region to tanker in water if supplies are insufficient?

Why not build a dam now? How much will it cost the ratepayer to build a Dam? Probably less than a 15% increase in your water rates when financed over 20 years. Wellington City alone have taken in 30 million a year through water charges.

What is the real reason a Dam is off the agenda? It can’t be cost, Wellington City want the ratepayer to fork out for another 100 million dollar stadium. Would it be that a few environmentalists have convinced the council that preserving a small amount of forest is more important than providing water to the population?

I think we should let the ratepayers make an informed decision.

If govt hadn’t wasted so much money over the years, we wouldn’t need to pay for water and road user charges and toll roads and road infrastructure.

IT’S NOT THE PEOPLES FAULT!!!

and they never lead by example and tighten their own belts

BASTARDS.

Privatising does not need to set up a monopoly – and certainly private monopolies are worse than public ones.

However, the French model works. In France the 30,000 local councils (yes they have a Mayor for every few hundred people) own the pipes etc. But they franchise out the management of the supply of water, and the treatment of waste water, to five large companies – some of whom are now so expert they manage water in other countries.
The Franchise for each “catchment” is for say fifteen years and of course the franchises expire at different time and go out to tender. The end result is that the management of about 5% of the catchments changes hands every year. This means each of the five companies is always sharpening its pencils to either keep their franchise for another term or maybe win another one. This is how we should manage many things in NZ – Medical Labs for example –rather than granting long term regional monopolies.
But we will never have sensible discussions about such matters while people insist water is free and should not be used for profit. Ah yes, lets nationalise the supermarkets.

Water supply is one form of infrastructure. So are electricity and gas supply and communications. The total costs of all these services can be kept in check if consumers know in real time what they are paying. This particularly applies to electricity which can vary widely depending on time of day and the weather.

The answer is to provide consumers with a console (their pc perhaps) which provides the real time price and aggregate consumption for a chosen period for each of these services.

Doing this nationwide would be an ideal project for the anticipated infrastructure spend (it would save upstream costs for each service) and would fit in well with proposals for universal broadband.

An ideal project on which to develop a national exportable expertise.

Friend in Sydney in one of the new suburbs. Two pipes coming into the house – one potable, one not. All the stormwater and grey water in the suburb goes to a huge holding tank, gets basic purification, comes back for toilet flushing, gardening etc. Far more efficient than everyone having their own tanks.

what cost retrofit?
Great idea should be for all new subsections
one way would be water tanks and use for loos, garden, dishwasher etc.
what cost per house?

http://tvhe.wordpress.com/2008/11/28/metering-and-the-market-for-water/

Some people argue water is special, our bodies are made of it, so we shouldn’t charge. They are half right, water is precious, and precisely because it is so important a price reflecting that is valuable.

Well RB, I’ve only lived in Wgtn 3 years but before that I was 20 years in Akld. I recall a certain time there when there was talk of using standing pipes to supply water. Remember that? Can’t see that happening down here.

Maybe Wgtn’s system doesn’t discourage profligacy as much as it might, but there are other ways to do that apart from privatisation. You could for example trade on the emotional/peer pressure engendered by the environmental hysteria which seems for some reason particularly prevalent in Wgtn.

A flyer in letterboxes suggesting a tsunamai may result from lack of water conservation for example would probably make a difference in Wgtn. That is, if we were as dumb as your average Aucklander. I said average…

Wrong. The right answer is “yes”. It is broke. They haven’t enough storage and they have not planned effectively.

Gaurantee they’ll say it’s fucked, in every way.

No problem with the user-pays principle, just make sure you don’t support water charges on that basis, that’s just fucking dumb. For the devil is in the execution, and in Auckland, they fucked it up.

Why does it not sink into otherwise thinking people, that when you change a historically not-for-profit entity into a for-profit entity, service levels reduce and charges rise. In case you misunderstand, that means you pay more, and get less. It’s not rocket science.

Put it this way: is water delivery in Wgtn at the moment, broken? No? Then fucking leave it alone, you ideological market-driven fruitcakes.

Water is so important that charging for it’s use has to happen or we will end up short’ it is limited in supply even if it seems in abundance in new zealand. Everyone who uses water should pay this includes power generators, irrigators and cities and towns. The way in which people pay or who pays is the problem and it will require transparency to deal with it. This is one reason that the local politicians in our area are seeking control of parts of our regional council so they can get their hands on the water for their benefit.

Privatization, the other issue, will fail as turning a publicly owned monopoly into a private monopoly wont achieve anything but higher costs in the end. You don’t really think a private company will pass on their internal saving to the stupid trapped consumer. Telecom was a great cash cow for many years as they cut infrastructure, staff and maintenance and they sure didn’t pass any savings on until some competition arrived do you think someone will turn up to compete delivering water? Do you think line companies are passing on their saving?