A couple of brief, but telling, digressions popped up in the course of an otherwise normal monthly business meeting of the Eatonton- Putnam Water and Sewer Authority last week.
One dealt with accounting – more specifically, the reasoning for including depreciation as a cost of doing business and how that can lead to some misconceptions about customers’ monthly bills.
A second dealt with efficiencies – more specifically, how spending money can save money, sometimes very quickly.
As for accounting and depreciation, businesses typically include depreciation as a cost in order to have money on hand to pay for worn-out equipment and other capital costs in the future. However, it is not usually money actually spent in an annual operations budget. It is more like a savings account to pay for future costs without having to borrow money.
In the past, both EPWSA and the city of Eatonton often did not include depreciation in their annual operations budget, so as to keep customers’ monthly bills lower.
“What we are doing is catching up,” said county commission chairman Bill Sharp and this year’s EPWSA chairman.
“It (a customer’s monthly bill) is what it costs to run the system, not what a bucket of water costs,” said Judd Doster, a city representative on the board.
Doster’s so-called “bucket of water” actually amounts to less than 10 percent of a typical household’s monthly bill. The bulk of a monthly bill goes to paying for the infrastructure that cleans, pumps, and pipes the water over miles and, for city residents, the additional infrastructure that pipes, pumps, and cleans the sewage.
As for efficiencies, ESG operations manager Brice Doolittle’s monthly operations report drew comments as well.
The new preventive maintenance program is “cruising right along” and appears to already paying itself off. Doolittle pointed to September’s “dramatic drop” in the number of service cut-offs and cut-ons that involved a three-member crew. In August, there were 150 such cut-offs. In September, 33.
A second example came with the effect of newly installed (and not cheap) screens for the rocks, sticks, leaves, and, yes, even diapers that can get into pipes leading to the east-side and west-side sewage treatment plants.
So far, Doolittle said the effect has been a 25 percent decrease in the amount of solid wastes going into the two plants for treatment, along with the power bills and chemicals to do it.
“It’s a lot cheaper to haul trash than to fix equipment,” said Sharp.