Town Talk Church Point
Town Talk Church Point
Diving Deep into Water Costs: Navigating Rising Bills and Infrastructure with Ms. Pam and Mayor Spanky
Ever wondered why your water bill is on the rise? This podcast episode promises a deep dive into the intricate world of water rates and infrastructure. We've got the savvy Ms. Pam from McBade Engineers and our town's very own Mayor Spanky to help us navigate the choppy waters of rising costs, outdated water and sewer systems, and potential DEQ fines. Who knew that water bills could be this fascinating?
Join us as we explore the fiscal responsibilities of small towns like ours, the crucial role of appropriate water and sewer rates, and the significant impact of federal grants in facilitating improvements. We'll guide you through the maze of long-term planning, budgeting, and even get into the nitty-gritty of the American Rescue Plan Act. Moreover, we compare Church Point's water rates with those in other communities, so you can see exactly where your money is going. And in case you ever pondered over the cost comparison between your water bill and bottled water, we've got you covered there too!
And just when you thought we had exhausted all water-related topics, we have an unexpected twist. We discuss the odd yet essential issue of toy removal from our water resources and the potential risks involved. It's all about resource expansion and the far-reaching implications of every small action. So come, be part of this enlightening conversation, and learn more about the unsung hero of our daily lives - clean water. Trust us, you'll never look at your tap the same way again!
Here we are with another edition of the Town Talk podcast. It is Chris, mayor Spanky and man. It's been almost some episodes of having special guests on with us, huh.
Speaker 2:That's right. I'm feeling like a Jay Leno, maybe Jimi Fallon, for these days.
Speaker 1:We got a lot of people joining us on the podcast and we're having a little fun, but today's topic is one that a lot of people around town have been talking about and we want to go into an explanation of why and it's why water rates will go up. I'm just gonna come out and say why water rates are going up. There are reasons why. There are official reasons why we will get the full explanation on why this is happening from Ms Pam, with McBaden engineers, and she will explain why rates are going up and what's going to happen. Do you want to get into anything Spanky Before we jump into Ms Pam and Ms Pam, by the way, hello. Thanks for joining us.
Speaker 3:Hi, thank you for inviting me. Glad to be here.
Speaker 1:Awesome, awesome. You want to get into anything Spanky?
Speaker 2:Well, basically the water rates are going up and I want to explain why.
Speaker 2:And then I would like Ms Pam to explain more in depth of what we're dealing with, because I know them, but she can articulate it a lot better than I can on certain things. What happens is once a year we have an audit and that's a legislative auditor. That's the ones that turn you into the state for not having you know your stuff right and they regulate pretty much how much you have to go up to keep consistency, you know, to keep the place going, and we have a sewer plant that was done in 1992 and a water plant that was done in, I think, 02. So their systems are getting very old and the components at 20 years and 30 years is starting to be very costly. Now, with that being said, I mean I hate to say like this, but the kicking of the can has ended. For a long time, water department was used to subsidize different things. Now we have not done that, but we've been very aggressive on repairing things and this, that and the other.
Speaker 2:I mean right now we have 12 valves to change that are corroded from over the years and that's going to come at a price of about $160,000. So I mean that's just one thing. Then another thing is it's hard to say, but since COVID this world has changed and the prices have went up and they have not went down. I'm not seeing it just on a personal level, on a pool we would sell in my personal business we would sell a bucket of chlorine for around $80, 90 bucks for 50 pounds.
Speaker 2:Well, now they're about $250 for the same one. So, and when I say the pools the biggest pool you know is about a half a percent of the amount of chlorine we use at the water plant. I mean we do sometimes 500,000 gallons a day. The rates are going up. We're still kind of low compared to other places around. Object Now, the ones that are lower have a set tax for water that the consumers pay for in their sales tax.
Speaker 2:That is a hard thing to pass, is a tax, we all know that. But if you don't pass a tax it's got to go towards the customer and we have 17,. Right at over 1700 customers. We're going from, on water, $1350 to $14. And I'm pretty sure sewer was $1150 or $1050 and it's going up to $14 because the sewer isn't much. It's 10 years older, so they have a lot of problems. We've actually had the DEQ come in and say if we don't that they could put us on a fine of $32,000 a day.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we've been aggressively doing that and making sure we're getting moving forward on that and the consumption is going up on both from 55 cents per 100 to 75 cents per 100 gallons after the first 1500. So the minimum is going to go up to $28 with that $1 state fee and that buys you 1500 gallons. So every 1000 gallons after that it'll be, between water and sewer, another $14. So this will. It's not the best time. We all understand that. This is not the best economy that we're rolling into right now, but the cost of the goods are not coming down, thank you, and they're still astronomical. And, with that being said, if we don't go up then we don't qualify for a lot of grants that help fix those problems. So you understand the kind of weird situation we're in it is, it is.
Speaker 2:Like we're in a bad economy and then the government is saying you have to fix these things, but if you're not charging enough, we're gonna find you 32,000 all the day. So it I mean, there's a how you say there's a gun to the head, right.
Speaker 1:Now, before we get into Ms Pam, to explain just a little bit more nuts and bolts, to go a little bit more in depth is this something and again, I'm not saying anything bad about previous prior administrations, but like was this just over time in church point, just maybe? Just okay, we'll just fix it a little bit, we won't worry about that. And then now you are seeing everything come together all at one time.
Speaker 2:Well, it's kind of like. I mean I hate to say it if you build a house right now and you don't maintenance it or do preventative and all this stuff, in 20 years you won't have a very good house.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And look, the reason why we're in this bind is not and I'm not gonna throw out any body- or anything like that. But at a time, church point was run the whole town with one cent sales tax. That was to run the police department. That was to run the city service. That was to do everything until they received that next tax in 2012,. They were running everything off of that one cent. In 2012, they did a one cent for the police department, which that's why we're that was a big win.
Speaker 2:But all those years of one cent paying for the police department and general fund paying for the police department, it you know that was rough, the money that should have been put towards maintaining and upgrading and all that was put towards keeping us safe. And I mean that's a hard decision to handle in the first place. So I'm not blaming anybody, I'm just it was the situation that it is Right at hand.
Speaker 3:yeah.
Speaker 2:And then I got in and it was like here's your platter of.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, spakie, one thing you're lucky you now have Ms Pam McBaid, engineering, who's now helping the town and doing a great job at it, and Ms Pam is on the episode with us. And, pam, do you want to maybe go a little more in depth on why rates are going up and what are some of the issues we're seeing? What are some of the improvements that we may be seeing? You want to go in on that?
Speaker 3:Sure sure and, if I may, let me take a little bit of that back as well, just to let you know that this is not uncommon. We work for many municipalities and it's not uncommon for municipalities that are small, that have very small budgets and that, have you know, don't have big industry or whatever that can compensate with high water rates or what have you. So you're you know, church points not alone is what I want to say. So it's not just church point or previous. It's not uncommon for everybody to say, hey, we need the budget and we want to keep rates low. You know I can still want to keep rates low because I can sit with someone on a budget. You know that is not uncommon. The problem is you can kick the can down the road to a point where you no longer can meet what I'm going to call there are, over time, increased unfunded mandate. By that. I think that's what you know. Thank you is trying to articulate their things.
Speaker 3:So, as we go, you have water plants, you have sewer treatment plants. We all know we live in a world that things get. You know you have regulations now that you didn't have before. We have a lot more environmental regulations, different things, and it's no different than on your sewer and your water, where they're saying hey, especially on your sewer, we now want your discharge limits to be even lower. Well, with lower discharge limits means more cleaning. More cleaning means more chemicals, right? So all of these different things that they're doing and then they monitor different things. So again, we you know technology is great as we get and as we learn more things, as we look at things in different environmental aspects or whatever, more things are going to come down on us and with that you have to make improvements. And you know the mayor was correct in the fact that they are saying if you don't fix stuff, you know you're going to be fine. And unfortunately, in order to take a plant that's older, sometimes, to meet some of these new permit requirements and I'll caution you guys with we are in six months from now we have to submit for our new five year permit on the sewer.
Speaker 3:So if you want your new permit on the sewer, you have to make sure that everything is hunky-dory with them and that you take care of any outstanding issues right. And so if a piece of equipment goes down in their minds, you need to be charging enough on your rate to be able to fix that. So part of it is you have to pay for your daily stuff now again, just like your home. But yay, over time, 15 years from now, you're roots are going to need to be fixed. So if you're not putting extra money in the bank and you're just keeping rates low, what do we all have to do? We have to go and we have to borrow to pay for that roof if we don't have it in our savings. So if we don't have the money saved up in our water fund and our sewer fund because we've kept the rates so low to just maintain it and to just do the small fixing, when you have large capital improvements which are bigger I got to get new valves, I got to put this new pertinent set, the sewer plant all that you can't. When you go out you say well, look, we don't have the money. You would love to have a grant.
Speaker 3:Well, what the federal government says is the federal government has done some numbers and they have a minimum that they think, at different income levels, is the minimum that people should pay. So, even at the lowest income, the federal government has established about it's roughly between $34 and $35 for water and $34 to $35 for sewer. So if you go to them for a loan to do any fixings on your sewer plant, the first thing they're gonna do is they're gonna say, well, let's get all your finances, let's look at everything with regards to your sewer. Only, they're not worried about police, they're not worried about everything they're like here or your cost. And then they look at your roots and how much money you're getting back.
Speaker 3:And if they feel, well, the reason why things are deteriorating is you're not, you're not keeping up with it because you're not charging enough, and they say, okay, but if you are charging enough so let's say you are charging 34, if they're saying well, you know what, you've been charging enough. It's just, things are expensive and you're at certain income levels, they'll be like you know what, we'll give you a grant. But if you're not charging enough and you need money to be able to do it, well, guess what you're going to do alone? Well, to pay back the loan, I'm going up on the rates to pay back the loan. So, basically, what the federal government is saying and they have always said this when they come in to help, whether it be grants or loans, the first thing they look at is are you in fact charging enough to keep up your system? And it's no different than you know. Hey, we've got to pay for all changes. Go up everything else. You're going to have to pay the loan to all in the car. Sooner or later you're going to have some major capital improvements that you're going to have to do.
Speaker 3:So Church Point has done a great job of meeting water. They've always met their limits and sewer, until some new mandates were done. They've had to make some improvements to meet those limits and again, that costs money. But we also have aging infrastructure and that cost money. We have been fortunate. So some of the things that you're going to see is we know we have aging meters, we have a lot of meters that we have to reread on our water and, of course, sewer is based upon your water consumption as well, and so we are getting some funds from the state through what's called the Water Sector Program.
Speaker 3:The Water Sector Program is actually funded from what we all know as the American Rescue Plan Act, or as we call ARPA for short. Arpa is COVID money. A lot of people knew how there was COVID money that was calculated based upon unemployment, sound impacts, the economy whatever. And money was sent to state and was sent to local. Okay, so with our local money we've already done St Jude, delahoucy and Marie and Michelle. So we took some of our money, the rest of it. So when the state said, hey, apply, we will give up to 75% grant. You still have to have 25% match. So we took the remaining of our local ARPA fund and leveraged it to get 75% grant from the state. So we took your money and we made it go further. So on the money from the state again, because the state's getting this from the fed, a requirement is a rate study. So while you have your study, you have your local finance. That your legislative auditor does every year. He will recommend if, in fact, your water and sewer is not breaking even or if it's actually underfunded.
Speaker 3:Then there's the second, also rate study. That's going to be done and we're going through the process. We're getting ready to embark on that process because we're getting $4.2 million from the state through ARPA. But again the fans are like, okay, we're getting ready to give you $4.25 million. In order to do that, you have to help and work with the state to have a rate study and you have to commit that, whatever the findings are of that rate study that you are going to implement. It's not a choice. So if they find in the rate study that we have that we're charging enough, then they won't make you go. But if they find that we're charging too little, then they're going to say they're going to give us the rate and if the council doesn't implement those rates, then you have to pay back that $4.25 million.
Speaker 3:So you got $4.25 million that the federal government and through the state is saying hey, we're going to help you to fix the infrastructure. They're doing this for many municipalities across the state. Every one of them has to do the same thing. They all have to commit and have to do what they come out with in the rate study. Otherwise, if they choose not to, that grant becomes a loan and you have to pay it back. Well, to pay it back we already know to pay it back If you had to pay back $4.2 million, you got to go up on your rates, which would be way more than anything they're going to come out with to say, hey, we're helping you to get this infrastructure done, they're paying for new meters, they're paying for new valves, they're going to pay for us to paint and clean the inside of your elevated water tank and they're paying for improvements at your water treatment plant.
Speaker 3:And then we're going after funding for your sewer, to fix things at your sewer plant, and that is going to be through another program and they require a rate study. So if the rate study is done now, they'll take those rates and say, okay, let's look at them from a standpoint on the sewer and how does that work for the sewer? So every one of our communities that we know that's needing these funds because they need the funds to get their water and sewer to where it needs to be. They're all undercharging and a good way to look at it is if we were charging more than enough or enough, we wouldn't have this backlog in these and you wouldn't need to be asking for this grant. So it's a small price to pay for the fact of the millions of dollars.
Speaker 3:We've already gotten over 1.5 million from the state previously in sewer over the last four years in sewer improvements. So again, we've had to match 25% of that. But that's a lot of money that the state has given us in sewer without even doing the rate study at that point. But now they're like okay, we have to do it. We're spending money in these different communities. We need to check to make sure they're charging enough because, again, we don't know if we'll have state funding you never know in the future if you've got that extra surplus state funding to pay for it, and we have to be able to self-fund and take care of our water and sewer systems. So, in a nutshell, I'm going to call it it's a mandate. It's a mandate from coming all the way down from the federal government, because they are, in fact, the ones that are behind all of these grant programs that we've been very blessed to be able to get, and will be way more money than anything our new rates will generate.
Speaker 1:I have a question, ms Pam, when it comes to where the rates will be now, after the rates go up. Where are we on average with other communities or towns in Acadiana, in the area, or are we on par with other areas? Are we still paying a little bit less? Where are we on average with other towns or municipalities? Our size.
Speaker 3:There are a few that we work with, that y'all or that. Others are way under.
Speaker 3:I mean way under. So they're going to have I'm going to call it more of a shock. You guys are somewhat under and I would say you're on par with people your size, because everybody is more or less a little under what they should be charging. Because, again, if your bill is less than $70 right now between water and sewer, then you're under what? Even the lowest, if you're the lowest that the federal government says, if it's of a community that poverty level the minimum you should be paying for water is like 34 to 35 and the same thing on sewer. So any community that's higher than poverty, poverty level and income as they got from the federal government standards, then you should be paying more than that. So I'll give you an example. So for me now, granted, young stills, bigger than, but I'm paying between my water and sewer, I'm paying well over $100. And it's and we're just the two people in our household. No, no sprinkler system, no, anything that is just, you know, normal laundry, showers, whatever. So there are communities that are laughy. You would be paying even more than that. I think some people in Lafayette, you know, pay tremendously more. But again, but young stills also a system like young still.
Speaker 3:We actually have a sewer tax. That was done back in the 80s. So the reason why the rates are even where they are is it's supplemented by a sewer tax. If the sewer tax went away then the rates would be even higher. So you guys are lower than many communities, but there's many communities that are the same size and in the same income level that are probably low like you guys. That are all going to have to be raised if they get this funding or if they want to go after any funding. The only way they can keep rates lower than that amount is you can never go after any funding, but chances are sooner or later you won't be a major structural crumble.
Speaker 1:Yeah, correct. So you know, I guess I'm not trying to sell it here, right? But I'm a resident of churchpoint, I know that my water will be going up.
Speaker 2:Yes.
Speaker 1:But on the other hand, is it fair to say that with my water bill that will be going up the infrastructure? Everything that we are, most things that we have in town, will be upgraded. Yeah, like so we're going up but we are seeing an upgrade to our system with the raise in the rate. It's not just the raise in the rate. And then we're going to keep with what we have right? I kind of wanted to clear that up a little bit.
Speaker 2:We're going to be doing a lot of things because we have to, and let me humanize it a little bit. Okay, the problem is, okay, what is on all these streams and all this stuff? What's the number one complaint of infrastructure? Road, Road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road, road. Because the reason why is because most of our road problems is on highways, which we've said a million times that we can't fix. But when your car hits that pothole on Main Street, oh, road. Okay.
Speaker 2:Well, the humanizing of water and sewer is I turn on my water, it comes on.
Speaker 2:I flush my toilet, it goes down. Things are great, Correct, and because it works, that it works Like I don't see why they're doing all this, but they don't understand the process. It goes through, you know, and that's the human side of it, is like, but the first night that we're out of water or the drain doesn't go down, then, oh my God, it's one of those things where electricity bills are high until a hurricane comes and knocks the electricity out for seven days. Then you're paying $60 a day to keep the generators running, and this and that you know, like it's the month before you were saying Jesus Christ, I will never pay more than this for electricity than the next month. You go out and you go buy a thousand dollar generator and $60 worth of gas a day, because it's that important, but you don't think of that when that monthly bill comes in. You know, and I'm not, it's just one of things. And look, the next part about it is how many people do you know right now that has bottled water in their refrigerator?
Speaker 1:Probably a good number of people. Good number right.
Speaker 2:Water is by the pallets at the pig and rods and people buy. Everybody has them. Well, for one gallon of that you're paying probably 10 bottles of water. I mean, if you're buying them single, that's two bucks. If you're buying them separate, it might be cheaper, but it's still a cost. Our water is 75 cents per 100 gallons. Okay, so that's 75 cents for I mean, how many bottles of water would that be? If 10's in one gallon? You know I'm not good at math, I think that's a thousand bottles of water.
Speaker 1:That's the human side of it, just putting it into terms.
Speaker 2:Everyday terms, yeah, that's what you mean, and that's what I'm saying is the water that goes into your faucet or your refrigerator, whatever, pretty much goes through the same processes as the water bottling companies and they're making 100 times what we're making. And look, people are happily grabbing those bottles of water. Cases of water, you know.
Speaker 3:Well, and I can also add to that, before we did St Jude, delahoucy, marie and Michelle Street there were leaks and there were boil advisories. I think over the course of three years there were 150 leaks that the town had to spend time to do. But those folks as well there may have been plenty of those that under the boil advisory went and got bottles of water in order to be able to supplement in their homes, because the fact that they were under a boil advisory or if the water was down while it was being fixed, there was a cost. Okay, we have with just fixing those four streets because, of course, when they had to cut the water off, depending on where the valves were which part of our new projects are gonna add what we call isolation valves so less people have cut off water when they're going to make the repairs. But we have cut the repairs down two thirds and so there's two thirds less.
Speaker 3:Before we had this heat wave, you guys had seen two thirds less of leaks and boil advisories because we fixed the lines that were causing that and were causing many people to have to deal with that and go buy water or use more electricity and boil it. So what you see on your bill is one thing, but when you don't have all of those boil advisories, when you don't have all of those out of water being off while we're making the repair, there's going to be the cost savings with energy. There's gonna be the cost savings at the store besides the frustration, right, and none of us wanna be out of water, none of us wanna have low pressure or whatever. But just doing those four lines with the American Rescue Plan money that you guys had, that you got from that was given locally we have seen a huge difference. In fact, the difference was so much that when we went after the grant money you got lower score that your system was getting better. But what we showed them was when we're putting the money you gave us to good use. So we've already seen an improvement just by looking at those things which many people if you weren't in those areas, the town, you may not have seen some of the same ones.
Speaker 3:But again, the stuff with the plant that we've gotta take care of, like the mayor said, with the chemicals, and I will tell you we have seen huge construction costs increase in doing that. So that's why we know how much money we need to make the repairs is way more than it would have been years ago, because there's a again nationwide we have a lot of water, sewer infrastructure needs, and so getting those parts and then making those, it just it costs a lot of money and there's a lot of need for contractors to do the work and we are limited. So, of course, everything is supply and demand right. So, again, you're gonna see that's what the average person is gonna see less boil advisories, less rereads, because when we get all of these new leaders in, there's gonna be more accurate reading.
Speaker 3:But the other thing is, because of the type we're getting, you're now going to have people that, instead of spending time rereading on behalf and I'm talking about workers and people, employees of the town they now can go do other stuff. They'll be able to go and do whether it's grass cutting or things with sidewalk, or go fix the sidewalks or do other things. There's going to be more time because right now you guys have to take crews off of doing those other things in order to go and reread meters so that you can, in fact, recover your cost. So when you don't have a bunch of people having to do that, it's going to free up some employee time and then there'll be benefits of the same employees being able to do other stuff while these meters do the work for you.
Speaker 2:And, like I said, with that time being put back into the worker's hands. That's where we can get better situations at the plant. It's all around, helps it. And to land a plane too. Ms Pam was saying there was like 150 something ball water advisories down those roads that we changed the piping under. That's 150 something mainline brakes. That's a lot different than what we're fighting right now from the drought. The drought was the dirt compressed and started busting lines. So on a normal summer we'll do 60, you know, 50 to 60 service lines, which is the small lines, not the mains. Well, this year we're over 100 and it's not stopping because we just we're fighting it, but we're.
Speaker 2:I've called four or five other water systems and we're like at 16 behind right now and they're like, man, I don't know how y'all are doing so well over there because, like I mean, there's one town I'm not going to say their name, but they have a backlog of over 300. But the people of Church Point do not see what the people in other towns are fighting. You know, they just know what, what they're dealing with, and they're like, well, it's going up again. I don't see you. No problem, you know, it's just what it is, you know. So I mean it's an unfortunate thing, but, like Ms Pam just said and I hope y'all caught that they unfunded mandate us to go up. Okay, if we don't go up, they take away our grants. But the more we fight to fix the plant, the government punishes us. So they took away 700,000 because we were taking steps to do exactly what they want us to do. So I hope everybody understands what.
Speaker 2:It sounds very confusing, I understand, but it is absolutely the truth. They come in they say you have to go up. Okay, if you don't go up, they take away all your grants. But if you do go up and you start fixing things, then they punish you for that too. And that's where a lot of other towns get clogged down and they don't do anything.
Speaker 2:Because if you're going to punish me for doing things well, we're just gonna have to be punished. I mean, I'm sorry, we got to move forward and we got to get this thing back right. I mean, one town just applied, I think, for just a sewer, if I'm not mistaken, and it's at a cost of, I think, $50 million. So the biggest thing that I want everybody to understand is we are fighting to keep this thing in our hands. Okay, because the moment that they make us or whatever, sell out which is not close, it's not something that's coming right away. But once a water and sewer system goes private, they go for pure profit. So they don't have to ask your permission to go up. They have a bad year, they just go up. And if that would happen, ms Powell, how much would? If it would privatize, it would probably double the bills, right?
Speaker 3:Correct? Yeah, they would, there's no doubt, because they don't get the same opportunities to go after the grant. So then that 100%, instead of us getting subsidized with 75% grants, if we keep the rate to what the federal government says. They have no opportunity to go after grants, so they just charge you. So whatever it costs them to fix they do that. But they also want to make a profit. There's CEOs to pay bonuses, there's people you know. All money in excess of what we spend stays in the enterprise fund for the water to be put back in and invested. That is not how it's going to work if it becomes privatized.
Speaker 2:And look in my experience in the last five years, most of the time when the person has a large water bill and they cannot understand why or whatever it's normally for a toilet, and I've seen people spend hundreds and hundreds of dollars when they could have just bought a new toilet and installed it. And that's another bad thing is we have a lot of rent houses in town. Well, the rent house owner does not have to pay that water bill. The person in the rent house has to pay that water bill. So I mean, I hate to say it, but rent house owners, they don't care. I mean, that's your problem, that's not there. So they're not going to change your toilets, they're not going to do anything to help you out because they're getting their money at the end of the month and that's fine, you know. But the reality is you're paying that four or $500 bill because your landlord does not want to change that toilet.
Speaker 2:It's cheaper to just go buy a toilet. You know because and I've told people hundreds of times put food coloring in the back of your toilet and if it, if, if your bowl underneath becomes red, then you've got a leak. I tell people all the time take a McDonald's straw, put it on the chain, because the chain will get sucked into the uh, into the hole, and then you got a leak and you'll never know it until the next person flushes the toilet. You put a McDonald's straw on the chain, it can't get sucked in. You know, these are little tips that can help you. And when I say hundreds of dollars, a toilet doesn't seem like a lot of of movement there. I mean, I had a toilet that was running for, I think, four or five days. My bill was $295. I mean, that's one toilet and it's just. You know, the water was a little right.
Speaker 1:You know just a little agitated.
Speaker 2:You think it's like oh, that ain't nothing, it's a lot of water. But the thing of it is is we're trying our best to get this thing right and we've we've hit a wall and we're going to keep on fighting until we get it right, you know.
Speaker 1:Miss Pam, anything you want to add before we wrap up.
Speaker 3:Just to let people know that it's money well-fit. We have a bunch of projects that will be started, probably within the next year. I'm hoping that the majority of the folks have new meters that's our hope and that we can get it done that quickly. But they're going to see a lot of improvement and we're going to continue to go after more grants as much grants as we possibly can to limit any additional increases. So for them to stay tuned.
Speaker 2:Stay tuned with what we're doing and we'll keep fighting for y'all and I can tell you let me be 100% honest too the people have to do their part too, because everybody that's throwing those baby wipes down the toilets and it's clogging up the lift stations and all this stuff. If you read on it, it says do not put in your toilet. But I'm telling you I don't attend homes, that I go to have them, and the thing about it is that all you know you're ruining pumps, then pumps of 450,000 a piece. Do yourself a favor. You get a leak fix. It guarantee you Water is much more expensive than that PVC collar that costs 50 cents that you could cut it in splice. There's a lot of these things that you could do to save yourself money and to not burden the system even more. The amount of toys that we pull pumps out of and there's Ninja Turtles and GI Joles and all that I know it's hard to stop that but, every time we got to pull a pump.
Speaker 2:That's taking more resources. I mean it's unfortunate, but it's the necessity and hopefully this is going to be a bigger increase than we've ever had. But hopefully we don't have to continue, because every year they're going to read, look at it, they're going to make their recommendation, then goes to the council and the council makes it into a law and I mean that's the basic of it and we can't say no. The council can't say no, we don't want to do that, we're okay with it, and you don't get any money and we're going to shut down your system, okay, well, thank you.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just the whole aspect of the whole thing. Well, if you do this, it's that. If you don't do that, it's this.
Speaker 2:And then we'll find you for it.
Speaker 1:So, ms Pam, our engineer, mcbaid engineer, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of Town Talk Podcast and our spanky as always, he's here. If you have any questions or any issues that you'd like for us to talk about on any episode, you can shoot us a message on our official Town of Church Point Facebook page.