To the editor:

The current budget cycle would be a good time for the city commissioners to correct the mistake they made last December in imposing that whopping increase in our water rates, which they said was needed to support future infrastructure projects.

It was a bad decision when they made it. To take a commodity that the city has a monopoly on and that we citizens literally cannot live without, and increasing the price of that commodity nearly 8%, in the same year that the Social Security Administration told us the cost of living was only rising 1.3%, was a bad look. And this was at the same time many family budgets were already being stressed by the pandemic.

But that rate increase looks even worse in retrospect. Just a few months later, the city was so awash in cash that it felt it could afford to add 20.5 positions to the city payroll. In March we learned that the city would receive approximately $19 million from the American Rescue Plan and that one of the specifically authorized uses of that money was for “water and sewer infrastructure.” Now, $1 trillion in additional federal aid for infrastructure projects appears likely to become law. We should not count any chickens before they hatch, but this certainly looks like exactly the wrong time to have burdened local taxpayers with super-aggressive increases in fees for future infrastructure projects.

All our local leaders at the city, county and school board levels should at least consider the idea of using the coming millions in federal money (which we taxpayers will, of course, be paying for) to actually relieve the current overburden on local taxpayers, as opposed to simply “giving” us more — and more expensive — government services.

Rick Golub,

Lawrence