As one might have predicted after the last Oxford Commissioners meeting earlier in the month, the Commissioners struggled again on Tuesday night to find a solution for its water and sewer system and how to pay for it.
Town Manager Holly Wahl put it plainly: the utility fund has been operating at a loss, and when long-term costs like depreciation are included, the gap only widens. “We have not been accounting for the full cost of operation for some time,” she said.
The underlying issue is hard to escape. Oxford is supporting a costly, modern treatment plant—estimated by one commissioner at about $18 million—with only about 600 users. There’s no meaningful growth on the horizon to ease that burden. Rates have to go up.
The debate now is over who pays.
Commissioner David Donovan questioned whether the current proposals do enough to shift costs to the heaviest users. Looking at the numbers, he warned that smaller households could take a hit not much different from that of high-volume users. “That doesn’t really achieve much of anything,” he said.
That drew pushback from the business community.
One local business owner said water is already one of his largest expenses and warned against what he called a “triple hit” of higher fixed fees, higher usage charges, and added unit costs. “We try to keep our prices fairly approachable,” he said. “I don’t want to have to raise prices to a place where it’s unattainable.”
Wahl noted that some of the increase reflects correcting past undercharges, particularly for commercial users. “What may appear to be a tax is really a correction of an error for a long period of time,” she said.
Commissioners also showed little appetite for using town reserves to ease the transition, arguing that doing so would only push the problem into the future. Donovan cautioned it would risk “making it worse for ourselves.”
In the background, another issue surfaced. Resident Steve Toll warned against using savings from the Oxford Police Department to subsidize the utility system, calling the idea “wrong-headed” and urging the town to keep the utility fund fully self-supporting.
No decisions were made but it was clear on Tuesday evening thatOxford can no longer avoid the true cost of its system. The only question now is how to spread that cost without doing more damage along the way.
One Response
Oxford leadership says they are worried about water and sewer costs, yet they waste money on controversial Flock cameras at the town entrances on Oxford Road. That tells you where their priorities are. They’re more interested in permanently recording and sharing every vehicle that comes and goes – sending license plates and photos into a widely accessible, searchable, and hackable database – than focusing on basic municipal management. Instead of tracking and broadcasting the habits of residents and visitors, maybe the town should concentrate on the infrastructure issues they’re now struggling to control.