GETTING SOAKED
Published in the August 30, 2025 issue.
On Monday night, the Bishop City Council reviewed a new rate study for the city’s water and sewer system as well as the new Capital Improvement Plan. This new rate study proposes raising the current price of water from $33 per month, and sewer, at $42 a month, to as much as $94.96 and $84.09, respectively, over the course of five years. This system serves 1,200 accounts. Public Works Director Nora Gamino and a L&T municipal consultant presented three different rate options.
“This is just a high-level introduction,” Gamino said. “We just want to get everyone thinking about how this would impact them.”
Every five years, the City of Bishop conducts a water and sewer rate study. These help the city to analyze the water and sewer rates within the Capital Improvement Plan (CIP), which is a multi-year roadmap of planned infrastructure investments. The last rate study was conducted in 2018 and was meant to continue until 2023.
The rates for water and sewer have held steady into 2025, and won’t increase until January of 2026.
The new water CIP identified approximately $3.97 million in critical rate-funded projects between 2027 and 2030, including pipeline replacements, water well improvements, and equipment/vehicle purchases. Similarly, the draft Sewer CIP wants $2.8 million between 2026 and 2030. These include deferred maintenance, collection system rehabilitation, and preparation for the new consolidated regional Bishop Area Wastewater Authority (BAWA) treatment plan development.
These improvements are necessary, Gamino argued. She stated that the city does not currently have the funds. “Infrastructure is aging. It’s decrepit. And it takes a lot of money and resources to fix,” she said.
“We’re not in a terrible spot, but we’re at a spot where the capital improvements are needed. The current rate structure is not just not going to come close to covering what needs to be done,” City Manager Deston Dishion echoed in an interview with The Sheet on Tuesday. Dishion is the former Bishop City public works director.
Monday night’s presentation outlined three different options to fund these projects. The first, low option, minimizes the immediate impact to ratepayers. This option deferred certain projects and does not fully fund the CIP. It does, however, carry the greatest long term risks, according to Gamino’s staff report, as project deferrals could lead to higher costs in the future. The second option combines cash funding with outside loans, which allows the full CIP to move forward but lowers some immediate rate impacts. The third and costliest option assumes the entire CIP is funded by ratepayers and reserves, which ensures that all projects are completed on time. However, this option poses the greatest risk to ratepayers. It could potentially have devastating impacts on Bishop’s poorest and most vulnerable populations.
“We don’t have a high income community,” councilmember Karen Schwartz worried on Monday. She wondered if there was a mechanism to slowly phase in rates.
“We have to account for elderly and low income populations,” the L&T consultant replied. Legally, according to Proposition 218, rates must be based on the reasonable cost of providing service, and each ratepayer must pay the same amount.
“In my mind, Option One is out,” Gamino said. Both she and Dishion argued for some sort of middle ground between the second and third options. Gamino said that she has been searching for state and federal grant funding, which could soften the blow for rate payers. (See the charts below for the fiscal impacts of the three options.)
Just how old is the Bishop city water infrastructure? Dishion told The Sheet that a water line on West Line Street will be replaced this coming year.
“That’ll be the first time in my 30 years that we ever actually financed anything for water improvements,” he said.
Further, the city wastewater treatment plant is an archaic 70 years old, and the two groundwater wells Bishop relies on are 30 and 40 years old.
“They’re past their useful life,” Gamino said, about the wells. “We had a well evaluation done in 2008, and those evaluations said you need to think about developing a new well.”
The city did look into developing a new well, on a property known as the well three site. It drilled exploratory test wells to look at water quality at different depths. At some of these depths, Gamino stated, elevated levels of arsenic and fluoride were found. Gamino doesn’t know what happened to the well effort after that.
“I read reports like that from 2008 and it worries me,” she said.
How did the city of Bishop end up in this position? Perhaps the rate study from 2018 could point to some answers. This study decreased the water rates from $37 in July of 2018 to $31 in July of 2019.
“I look back on that and go huh. It’s not normal to decrease that much into the future, because there’s always escalation, there’s always inflation. Those numbers don’t typically go backwards,” Gamino said.
“If they had just held steady at 33, then increased by one dollar per year, we would be at our starting point for option one,” Gamino furthered. “I can’t change what’s in the past. They did their analysis, and this is what they found, so this is what they decided.”
Both Gamino and Dishion were unsure how the public would respond to these new proposed rate increases. Dishion expressed that every time a change is implemented, the public will react.
“You tell somebody they’re going to pay $100 for water and sewer service and they scream at you, but they don’t mind paying $190 or $160 a month for two cell phones,” Dishion said. “Which can you live without?”
“People will say that they should not have to pay for water. And I want to clarify that, water may be a ‘free’ resource to residents of the Owens Valley, but the delivery of water to your faucet is not free, maintaining water infrastructure is not free, and insuring that our water is safe to drink is not free – and those are all the things that rates pay for,” Gamino echoed.
Looking towards the future, Gamino wants the City of Bishop to install more water meters. Currently, Bishop only has 80 meters. She stated that while these are also riddled in controversy, they would provide more accurate data, and make water management easier. According to State Bill 552, which was passed in 2021, Bishop will need to have meters installed at every connection by 2032. Gamino hopes to expedite that process.
“Before our next rate study, my hope is that we have meters,” Gamino said during the meeting.
The Sheet asked her why she thought water meters were controversial. She said she didn’t know. Terry Tye, the water manager for Indian Creek-Westridge Community Services District, said it has to do with cost. He speculated that implementing water meters in Bishop could cost up to $7 million. (Please note, The Sheet has not fact-checked this. But we’re betting Terry’s right.)
No decision was reached on which option the City Council will vote on. On September 22, the next council meeting, the final rate recommendations will be presented. The public is encouraged to comment.
