LUCERNE — Residents of this lakeside community squared off against their water provider Friday evening in what turned into an impassioned and occasionally heated argument against the proposed rate hike of California Water Service Co. (Cal Water).
A crowd of about 250 people packed the Lucerne Alpine Senior Center”s Barnes Hall for the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) hearing – one of 15 held throughout the state in communities that are facing rate increases by privately-owned Cal Water.
“I see the hostility in the faces here,” Lake County District 3 Supervisor Denise Rushing told Administrative Judge Linda Rochester. “I see the anger. But the single most emotion I see is fear – fear of having to move from their homes and communities because they can”t afford the water.
“They”re afraid they can”t sell their homes because they”re paying two to four times” more than in most other districts, she said.
“In Cal Water”s 34 districts, Lucerne”s rates are the second highest,” she said.
And that”s in a community that”s bordering on impoverished.
In a hearing that lasted two hours, about 30 Lucerne residents took their two-minute turns railing against Cal Water, corporate greed, and the PUC, the regulating body in which many of the speakers have lost faith.
“We”re almost a ghost town,” one woman said. “Businesses are closing every week. But the PUC can at least say they held a meeting.”
One by one, residents described a community already reeling by the steep rates of Cal Water, which is trying to implement a 77-percent rate increase over three years starting in 2014.
Many of the speakers, seniors and other residents on fixed income, said it was nearly impossible to pay the current rates. Some said they had to cut back on showering to once or twice a week. Others talked of having to decide which to go without – their water or their food or medication.
The San Jose-based company is arguing to the PUC that the rate hike is necessary to fund needed improvements and compensate for lagging sales in a community whose population has fallen in recent years.
Lucerne dentist Doug Reams, head of the Roaring Mouse Alliance, which he started to protest Cal Water”s high rates, said that the corporate water giant can charge whatever it wants in a community like Lucerne, because there”s no city government to keep it in line, “and the County of Lake, though sympathetic, has been either unwilling or unable to jump in and help.”
Plus, Cal Water is a corporation listed on the New Stock Exchange whose primary objective is to make money for its stockholders.
“We”re adamantly opposed to the privatization of water (companies),” Reams said. “It doesn”t work. It”s all about profit – and where does that leave the people of Lucerne?”
Reams, who said it”s not uncommon for residents to get $600 and $700 water bills every two months, said some of the cost burden comes from surcharges and fees that, in his years as a customer, he still hasn”t been able to make sense of.
