Fee for water hook-up too high

The other day my pump went out in my irrigation system. Living in Village Green and having reclaimed county water running under the street in front of me, I thought I would cost it out to hook up. After numerous phone calls (site is bad) and emails to the county, I got the information I needed to cost out the reclaimed water hook-up.

From what the county has told me, the cost will be: $675 for the meter; at least $1,500 for "me" to hook up. Plus unknown cost for road repairs. So it looks like $2,175, plus the unknown costs, plus the cost from a plumber to hook up to my irrigation system ... this got to be $200-plus . So your cost could be up to $3,000, depending on the unknown street repairs.

Here’s the “dumb” of the “dumb and dumber” part: The county is charging me at least $1,500 for hook-up because I have a corner house and my curb is 150 feet long. If your curb is 50 feet long, your bill would be one third of mine. Hey, makes sense to me. Remember, this is just to plug into the main reclaimed water pipe. Everybody’s hook-up is pretty much the same but mine costs three times as much.

Ok, so here's the “dumber” part: The county had this formula to recover the cost of putting the pipe in years ago. Well, I ain’t going to do it, I’m going to fix my system. So what money did they recover? None.

I can’t make this stuff up; this is insane! And they lose the monthly charge for the water usage, too.

Wait, here’s a great idea: They need to charge 10 times more for the monthly water usage to recover the cost quicker! Let’s charge 20 times more — even quicker.

This story was originally published May 27, 2016 at 1:08 PM with the headline "Fee for water hook-up too high."