A water rate study in which consultants Freese and Nichols recommend raising Lawton’s water rates will be submitted to the City Council at their Feb. 25 meeting.
Mayor Stan Booker recalled that the City Council raised Lawton’s utility bills – water, sewer, and solid waste collection/ disposal – by 15% in Fiscal Year 2023.
Lawton’s water revenues subsidize the city’s General Fund, City Manager John Ratliff said. Consequently, “Our water system is underfunded,” he told Southwest Ledger.
Approximately 40% of Lawton’s water receipts are diverted to the General Fund to finance myriad expenditures in other departments, Public Utilities Director Rusty Whisenhunt said.
Almost $20 million of the annual receipts from water and sewer bills “are being transferred to the General Fund,” Whisenhunt told the council last June. “We need to start thinking about how we should fund our water and sewer systems.”
The City of Lawton uses “less money from our water and sewer rates to finance operations and maintenance of those systems than our peer cities do,” Whisenhunt told the Ledger. In other words, “We take care of our water and sewer systems on less money than our peer cities do,” he said. “ That’s why we’ve had so many problems with those systems.”
To city off icials, Lawton’s peer cities are Norman, Edmond, Enid, Moore, Midwest City, and Broken Arrow.
The City of Lawton has approximately 30,000 utility accounts, 26,500 of which are residential customers, according to Deputy Finance Director Kristin Huntley.
A Lawton resident whose monthly utility bill for 6,000 gallons of water and 3,000 gallons of wastewater is billed $58.75, Whisenhunt informed the City Council last June. Almost $20 of that bill is “fees,” he said. Those include:
• Water-inside residential: the charge for the treated water the customer used during the month.
• Pumping fee: the customer’s share of the cost of pumping and maintaining pumping equipment to move water between the city’s lakes and treatment facilities.
• Sewer-inside residential: the charge for removing and treating the sewage from a customer’s home for the month.
• Sewer rehab-residential: a customer’s share of the cost of the federally mandated repairs to the sewer system.
• Refuse-curbside: the charge for removal and disposal of garbage and trash from your home once a week.
• Refuse-state fee: a customer’s share of the fee that the state charges for the city to operate the sanitary landfill.
• Capital outlay: a customer’s share of the cost to purchase wheeled equipment such as graders, fire trucks, police cars, trash trucks, etc.
• Drainage maintenance: the customer’s share of the cost to trim, mow, and clear drainage areas, as well as the cost to clear and maintain municipal storm drains.
• Stormwater charge: the customer’s share of the cost to implement an EPA mandated water quality program.
• Waurika water purchase: each customer’s share of the cost for the city’s portion of the water storage, right to withdraw water, and capital improvements at Waurika Lake.
In April 2024 the City Council ratified an agreement in which Republic Paperboard Co. agreed to pay higher city utility rates that are “closer to those of other industrial users.” Republic’s rates for water, sewer, and solid waste collection were established by contract with the City of Lawton on June 9, 1998 – and had not changed for almost 26 years.
The new schedule will be phased in over a five-year period and will increase each year until rates reach “current industrial water rates,” Whisenhunt wrote.
Starting with April 1, 2029, rate adjustments will be tied to the South-Central Consumer Price Index based on any change from 12 months earlier. However, the maximum yearover- year increase will be limited to 2%.
Republic Paperboard consumes an average of 1.3 million to 1.5 million gallons of water per day, according to Caitlin Gatlin, the city’s communications manager.
Republic had been paying 87 cents per 1,000 gallons of treated water, while it costs the city up to $5 per thousand, Ratliff said. The industrial customer now pays $2.25 per 1,000 gallons, he told the Ledger.
Fort Sill, too, pays the same rate as Republic Paperboard, “and they are our heaviest water users,” Ratliff said.