WYNNE — Wynne Water Utilities has completed its rate study required by the state of Arkansas.
Wynne Water Utilities General Manager Blake Marotti said the city’s rates for water and sewer will remain unchanged – for now.
“We did the assessment through Crist Engineers. They went through our whole financial system, looked at all of our end users, water usage, all those kind of things and kind of put it into a calculation to see if our rate structure is where we need it to be without any kind of potential issues down the road as far as finances go,” Marotti said. “Everything checked out there. It all looked good. They came back with a recommendation as our system is in good working order. It looks like the wastewater rates that we’ve got are doing their job to let us do the things we need to do. I’m going to turn that in at the end of this month and they should push that on through with no changes.”
Marotti said that’s not the case for many other utilities throughout the state of Arkansas.
“With these rate studies, the government requires you to up your rates,” he said. “Once they see these calculations and these consulting engineers give their recommendation, they look at all that and if they see that they’re in a position to where they’re in a financial deficit, they will make you increase your rates to accommodate that.
“The whole reason behind it is a lot of these smaller systems – you see them all throughout Arkansas – they get into issues with consent orders because they can’t maintain their systems in the proper way because they don’t have the funding,” Marotti added. “Now, they’re requiring them to be set at a standard to where they can do that and, if they can’t, a lot of these cities, these smaller cities, you can see they’re starting to consolidate with larger cities.”
