The city of Ottawa has been asking us to conserve water, or cut back on consumption as much as possible. I’m sure you’ve seen / heard the ads – especially the ones in the summer about watering your lawn. As it turns out, people were listening and actually did cut back on their water consumption. Fantastic right? Not so much – people cut back enough that Ottawa is now seeing a revenue shortfall and as a result has increased the price of water.
I’m actually not sure how I feel about this. When I first heard about it, I thought it was a pretty craptacular move by city counsel – sitting pretty solidly in the fail category, but the more I think about it, I’m not so sure it’s a complete fail anymore – depending on how things shake out.
Yes, it sucks that you’ll be paying more for less, or perhaps I should say paying the same for less – but won’t that make you want to use even LESS water, thereby conserving even more? That’s a good thing right? Of course if Ottawa stays with the same strategy then that will mean another increase next year, and another one the year after that, etc – which means we’ll just keep paying more and more for less and less water, and that doesn’t sound like much of a reward for trying to do the right thing…
Hopefully it works out to be more per liter, but not a bigger bill.
Paying less for less is a good thing in this case.
I too am not too sure what to think. I think we are too generous with water as a society, but I think there should be an allowance or a higher rate for ‘over’ consumption. But, I think it should also take into consideration the number of people living in the household. As obviously a family of 4 or five would ‘need’ more water than a family of 2.
We try and conserve a a fair bit of water, but we could certainly do better. We certainly can not afford to conserve water and keep paying larger and larger bills.