Streetsboro City Council authorizes increase in water rate
The Streetsboro City Council met Monday evening for its biweekly meeting to discuss local affairs, with the main takeaway being the authorization to increase the city’s water rate to 3.5 percent.
Mayor Glenn Broska explained the city’s viewpoint behind the hike in water rates.
“We don’t have any problems with our water system, but there is an expected time of life and there are some water lines that we want to replace and there are some water lines that we want to extend,” Broska said.
The city of Streetsboro has plans to overhaul its current water infrastructure, hence the increase in rates to compensate this project and others. The city had plans to increase rates in the mid-2000s, but for whatever reason, it never happened and the capital improvements fund in the water department suffered dramatically, according to Broska.
“We’re not trying to get it all in one spot now but increasing the water by this percentage will allow us to start to claw back a little bit and put us in a position where we are going to be able to do the projects that we want to do,” Broska said.
Councilman Anthony Lombardo reiterated Mayor Broska’s support for the rate increase.
“We had to come up with a reasonable amount of money to increase the rate to moving forward so we can get these projects handled,” he said. “There’s a 2 percent right now that the residents pay that basically covers the basics, but any extreme repairs, we had to add an increase.”
With the increase in the water rate, the city is opening the door for other projects to be completed alongside the improvements of the water lines. The council also discussed plans for the city’s amphitheater project but postponed the discussion to its November 22meeting as they await more information.
According to Jon Hannan, the Vice President of Streetsboro’s City Council, the water line project is going to cost an estimated $8 million for the city.
“A couple years ago we had a study done that showed it would be very expensive and we weren’t going to be able to make that happen without some sort of additional funding,” Hannan said.
Hannan and Streetsboro officials originally thought the increase was going to be close to 12 percent, citing the American Rescue Plan as the reason for the rate being much lower.
“We passed the increase on to the residents that are using the water and that increase will help fund it,” Hannan said.
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