Comanche County
OKLAHOMA CITY – The administrator of Pecan Valley Waterworks, which sells drinking water to 600 homes west of Lawton, expects to refile a rate increase request soon with the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.
An application to raise the base rate was filed with the commission on Feb. 14, but Jack Outhier, the manager/operator of the system, subsequently asked the commission to dismiss the request, which the commissioners did on July 14.
“We had so many issues to deal with at the time,” Outhier said. “There was the coronavirus, we were behind on paperwork and I didn’t want to submit inaccurate and incomplete information to the commission,” he said. “We had to have everything in” to the agency “by the first of June.”
Pecan Valley is one of seven privately owned water companies in Oklahoma. The Corporation Commission regulates prices and service reliability of privately owned water utilities that perform retail business. Pecan Valley Waterworks is owned by the Wilson Trust “what is left of the late Harold Wilson’s estate,” Outhier said. The Pecan Valley and Shelter Lake additions were developed by Wilson.
Outhier said he thinks he’ll file a new application for a rate increase of perhaps 10% – “which is quite modest” – within a month, he said on July 17. “It typically takes six months to get through the process,” he added.
PVWW’s existing rates were established almost three years ago; the Corporation Commission’s Public Utility Division approved them in late November 2017. Expenses have increased since then, Outhier noted.
For example, the cost of water that Pecan Valley Waterworks buys from the City of Lawton has increased.
Lawton’s City Council voted June 23 to raise their municipal water rate by 1.7%; that occurred four months after PVWW filed its application for a rate hike.
Between July 2019 and July 2020, PV W W purchased 95,694,000 gallons of water from Lawton, ledgers reflect.
Pecan Valley Waterworks sells potable water to residents of Pecan Valley North and South plus Shelter Lake, Outhier said.
“We’re operating in the red,” he said. “We don’t make any money on the sale of water. It’s a ‘pass-through’.”
Rick Kerr, president of the homeowners association that represents the 52 residences in the Shelter Lake Addition, told the Ledger that the rates charged by the PVWW “seem to fluctuate.”
The company charges a flat base rate of $29.56 per month per customer for the provision of water service, plus whatever the City of Lawton charges per thousand gallons of water the customer uses.
The base rate generates $354.72 per year per customer. If the customer’s meter has to be replaced, “It costs us between $300 and $400,” Outhier said, “and there goes a year’s worth of revenue.”
Also, PV W W was contacted at the first of March by the state Attorney General’s Office and the Corporation Commission’s Public Utility Division, which “‘requested’ that we suspend all cutoffs.” Consequently, “We had an entire page of accounts that hadn’t been paid,” he said. “That was thousands of dollars in unpaid bills.”
Cutoff notices started going out July 15. Many of those customers paid promptly, and by the end of the week the number of accounts in arrears was “down under 30,” Outhier said last Friday. Any customer whose service is suspended and has to be reconnected is charged $50 during business hours, $75 after hours.
Pecan Valley Waterworks also operates a central sewer system that serves half of the 600 residences that buy water from the company, Outhier said. The other half are on septic systems, he indicated. The PVW sanitary sewer system is regulated by the state Department of Environmental Quality.