I hate to be the bearer of bad news but It’s not just your electric or gas utility that’ll be ticking you off. In Connecticut, there are 2 big water companies and this summer both of them are coming for your wallet.
Connecticut Water serves around 350K people in 60 towns and they just asked the state in May for about 21% more, which is around $15.54 a month. Aquarion, which supplies my house in Greenwich, serves 250K people statewide, most of them in Fairfield County. It was sold by Eversource on June 30 to a public authority and now PURA doesn’t regulate it.
First, let’s talk Connecticut Water with their deadline coming soon. They claim their ask is 21% but their parent company is telling Wall Street a different story. And now the water companies don’t have to wait for a rate case to jack up your bill, they can just add surcharges whenever they please and regulators have let them do it 4 times over the last 2 years and it now sits at nearly 10% (which is the legal ceiling).
The company told shareholders that it anticipates pushing roughly $238 million in PFAS cleanup costs onto ratepayers and they won’t need a rate case to do it.
The company asked for a big raise in 2024 but regulators threw out most of it, mainly because the company couldn’t illustrate that their projects were finished and serving customers.
The new request, according to the parent company’s latest quarterly report, covers projects “through the end of 2026.” A lot of this work hasn’t happened yet. The regulators who stood up for ratepayers in 2024 are gone. The state legislature seated a new five-member PURA just 5 days before the filing. The company’s president, Craig Patla, told the Hartford Business Journal that they expect a fairer hearing with this new board.
Onto Aquarion: when they were owned by Eversource, they asked for a 42% rate increase. When the sale went through, the new owner withdrew the ask. PURA’s approval order also freezes rates for 180 days, so nothing will change until the end of the year.
The new owners of Aquarion believe they’ll need increases of 6.5% to 8.35% a year, for every year over the next decade. With that rate, your bill will double over a decade. They portray this as a smaller, more acceptable increase instead of the big fights that the utilities pick every few years. We’ll have to see how it plays out.
And like I wrote, PURA no longer has a say in this. The state’s water regulation page makes it clear that it now doesn’t regulate Aquarion, at all.
The rate decisions are now made by the new Aquarion Water Authority’s own board. I’ll be reporting on who sits on the board and how ratepayers can provide feedback.
Here’s what you can do. Email PURA.ExecutiveSecretary@ct.gov (with docket number 26-03-15) by September 15. The decision will be made in the new year, February most likely. Aquarion customers have nowhere to write yet but I’ll share it when I find out. I’ve asked Connecticut Water for a list of projects behind their request and I’ll publish what they send.