Bucking four years of intense public opposition, the Metropolitan District Commission voted overwhelmingly Monday to approve a controversial water discount for large commercial users.
The utility — which supplies water and sewer services to eight member communities, including East Hartford and Windsor, and portions of four non-member towns, including Glastonbury and South Windsor — had come under fire from ratepayers and consumer activist groups for advancing similar proposals in 2016 and 2018 and eventually withdrew them.
But this time, the MDC’s Board of Commissioners shrugged off the criticism and voted 17-4 to finally pass what officials described as a much-needed economic development measure.
MDC CEO Scott Jellison defended the decision, arguing that the agency has to offer incentives to private companies to spur investment and offset losses from rising operational expenses and declining water use rates in and around the capital region.
“We’re just trying to create tools within our toolbox so that we can be competitive with our counterparts across the state and across the country,” Jellison said.
The new ordinance provides a discount of up to 50 percent on water prices for customers that use more than 600,000 gallons of water per day. The only MDC customer that even approaches that capacity is Niagara Bottling Co. of Bloomfield.
MDC officials have long maintained that reduced commercial rates would boost profits and allow the utility to eventually lower rates for residents. But Niagara’s likely position as the policy’s sole beneficiary, combined with a 13.5 percent hike in water-use charges for regular customers approved in December, have fueled accusations that the markdown is little more than a corporate handout.
“We’re disappointed,” said Valerie Rossetti, a member of the anti-discount activist group Save Our Water. “There’s been overwhelming public opposition. I feel like some of the information we’re presenting is falling on deaf ears.”
Area legislators, mainly Democrats, have also criticized the proposal.
In a statement released Monday afternoon before the MDC took its vote, state Sen. M. Saud Anwar, D-South Windsor, said the plan prioritizes the wrong users.
“My concern is that the price of water for a larger company would be less than what Connecticut customers would pay,” Anwar said. “This is unfair and unacceptable.”
The senator also said he wants protections in place for consumers in the event of a drought.
“While this appears unlikely, it’s worthwhile to make sure that if it happens, the people of Connecticut will be first in line for water, not an out-of-state company,” he said.
It was a severe drought, lasting from the summer of 2016 until the spring of 2017, that sapped political support for the reduced commercial rate when it was first put forward almost four years ago. Though the MDC assured elected officials in the member towns that they had more than enough water to weather the crisis, the agency’s view that it could not prioritize residential customers over commercial users during shortages provoked an angry backlash, and after months of debate, the commissioners abandoned their proposal.
The MDC’s financial position has weakened in recent years as demand for water drops and costly infrastructure repairs come due. By the agency’s estimates, water sales have fallen on average by approximately 3 percent per year.
The utility has dialed back distribution to about 50 million gallons of water per day, but even that has not been enough to offset the effects of slumping industrial use, new water-saving technology, and softening demand from households, which use less water today than they did 20 or 30 years ago.
