East Bay Municipal Utility District will consider a proposal in June to raise rates 13% over two years for water customers and a 17% increase for wastewater customers to update century-old infrastructure and build new water treatment plants.
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Starting in July, the proposed rate increase will add about $8 to the average water customer’s bill — and slightly more than $4 — to pay for investments by the public water utility into climate-resilient systems, according to EBMUD public information office Nelsy Rodriguez.
“We have to do this now,” Rodriguez said. “Our system is more than 100 years old. We turned 100 in 2023, and some of the infrastructure that we have in the ground is still the original infrastructure that we inherited.”
Rodriguez said that EBMUD is planning $1.2 billion in capital improvements to wastewater infrastructure in the next two years. These plans are part are the first set of infrastructure investments as part of $5.6 billion in upgrades over the next decade, which includes $713 million going toward water treatment facilities and another $1.7 billion toward water pipe replacements. Once they’re completed, additional infrastructure improvements will not be needed for approximately 50 years, according to Rodriguez. The revenue raised by the rate increase will also speed up the annual replacements in EBMUD’s 4,200 miles of pipes throughout its system.
“It’s a much, much better practice to replace pipes than to keep fixing the same broken ones over and over,” Rodriguez said. “The only time anyone thinks about them is when they burst, and we have to shut off the water to fix them… significant investments in our pipelines mean that people can go on not thinking about water for decades.”
In addition, the revenue will pay for new water treatment facilities that utilize UV light and chlorine to treat water from the Sacramento River when droughts force EBMUD to supplement its water sources, Rodriguez said. EBMUD gets its water from the Mokelumne River for the vast majority of the year. But during intense droughts, the agency siphons water from the Sacramento River to supplement its supplies, as occurred in 2014, 2021, 2022.
That diversion of water came with complaints from customers who questioned why their water tasted different, according to EBMUD officials.
“With the ultraviolet and chlorine disinfection capability, we’ll be able to treat other source waters to the same high level as our Mokelumne water, and customers shouldn’t notice a difference,” Rodriguez said.
The EBMUD Board of Directors will hold a public meeting on June 10 to review the proposed budget with its rate increases. If approved by directors, a 6.5% increase would be implemented on July 1, with an additional 6.5% increase set to take effect on July 1, 2026.