Water Your Thoughts - Care to save $475?

Another Earth Day is upon us. What are your plans to celebrate it? Care to join Avon Lake Municipal Utilities at a beach clean up family service project at Miller Road Park  at 3PM April 21? (Learn more on our Facebook page) Why, you ask? Our fate—and yours—is more closely linked to a healthy Lake Erie than you might think.

Lake Erie is the only source of the water we provide to you for drinking, cooking, bathing, and all your other needs. Everything that washes into the lake must be taken out before we are ready to provide the water to you. We spend millions of dollars a year doing this, and issues like the algae blooms Lake Erie has experienced during the past few years have increased our treatment costs even more. We continuously make required modifications to our treatment process to always assure that the water you receive is of the highest quality.

Someone recently asked if we could quantify what benefits Avon Lake Municipal Utilities provides to its customers. While we are a service organization providing high-quality water on demand and water reclamation to remove the waste you’ve put into it before it goes back to Lake Erie, we provide more than just that. Our customer service and field service staff are available to answer questions and investigate issues you may have with your water and wastewater service or bill. We base our decisions to best balance quality, quantity, cost, and service.

To make things a little more tangible, we are a regional operation providing water to more than 200,000 in a seven county area and treating wastewater generated by 30,000. This regionalization saves Avon Lake customers $3.8 million each year through the rates we charge in comparison to those charged by other Ohio cities of a comparable size. That’s a $475 per year savings for each customer.

We are also helping keep Avon Lake citizens’ taxes low through our capital improvement program. When we undertake a water or sanitary sewer line project (which is paid through the rates we charge for service), we repave the street that is torn up, thereby preventing the City from needing to expend tax dollars to repave that street. Additionally, we undertake stormwater system design and construction during sanitary sewer projects, which significantly reduces the City’s expenses from what they would be to perform the work separately. The repaving and stormwater work has saved the tax payers millions over the past several years.

We are constantly looking for better deals and have recently negotiated contracts, modifications to construction projects, and refinancing of bonds that will save our customers at least $2.5 million. We are currently investigating other options that may save an additional $500,000.

Avon Lake Municipal Utilities is your water and wastewater provider. This piece is a wonderful opportunity to inform you, our customers. We welcome more interactive dialog—via telephone (440-933-6226), email, social media (Facebook/Twitter), or in person (201 Miller Road). You can also follow me on Twitter to hear my thoughts, specifically. Be sure to Follow us on Twitter or Like our Facebook page for timely tips and updates and/or to provide feedback.

Healthy customers, healthy environment.