Winnipeg water and sewer rate hike clears first hurdle

CBC News

· Posted: Mar 10, 2025 8:58 PM EDT | Last Updated: 12 minutes ago

A connection to rise water-and-sewer rates successful Winnipeg by $18.67 a period to support gait with the increasing outgo of sewage-treatment upgrades cleared its archetypal hurdle astatine metropolis hallway connected Monday.

City council's water, discarded and situation committee voted 3-1 to hike water-and-sewer rates for the last 9 months of 2025, but clasp disconnected connected making adjacent larger hikes successful 2026 and 2027 to let metropolis unit to find different means of backing the city's stock of the adjacent signifier of its $3-billion wastewater upgrade.

Coun. Sherri Rollins (Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry) voted against the hike, connected the ground the metropolis made its rate-hike recommendations aft assembly approved the city's budget for the year.

The complaint hike, which inactive faces support from enforcement argumentation committee and metropolis council, would summation the average residential h2o and sewer measure successful Winnipeg from $1,308 a twelvemonth to to $1,476 for 2025.

Winnipeg's h2o and discarded section recommended assembly summation this year's tab to $1,532 and past rise rates to effect successful yearly bills of  $1,968 successful 2026 and $2,308 successful 2027.

Water, discarded and situation committee seat Coun. Ross Eadie (Mynarksi) said past week these hikes are excessively overmuch for homeowners to bear.

Water and sewer rates person been rising for decades to assistance the metropolis wage for its wastewater-treatment upgrades. 

The state ordered the upgrades successful 2003 to trim the travel of phosphorus and nitrogen from Winnipeg sewage attraction plants and combined sewers into the city's rivers — and yet into Lake Winnipeg, wherever precocious concentrations of phosphorus, successful particular, spawn algae blooms.

The metropolis has already upgraded the city's 2 smaller sewage-treatment plants, the West End and South End h2o contamination power centres.

It is present successful the midst of upgrading its largest sewage-treatment plant, the North End Water Pollution Control Centre. Work is astir implicit connected the archetypal signifier of the project, which involves caller headworks astatine the plant. The metropolis volition adjacent physique a caller installation to dainty biosolids, which is partially treated achromatic sludge from each 3 sewage attraction plants.

The last signifier of the task is simply a installation that volition region phosphorus and nitrogen from the effluent discharged from the works into the Red River.

This enactment volition not destruct algae blooms connected Lake Winnipeg. When each the phases of the upgrades are complete, Winnipeg's stock of the full measurement of algae-spawning nutrients that extremity up successful Lake Winnipeg volition lone beryllium whittled down by a azygous percent point, from 5 per cent to 4 per cent.

It is besides engaged successful a multi-decade process of replacing combined sewers — which transportation some tempest h2o and sewage — with abstracted pipes devoted to onshore drainage and sewage treatment.

In a abstracted vote, the water, discarded and situation committee approved a program to divert a dividend metropolis hallway utilized to gully connected h2o and sewer revenues to ward the outgo of the sewage-treatment upgrades.

Winnipeg utilized to trust connected this dividend to assistance equilibrium its budget.

The committee besides approved a program to alteration the mode garbage and recycling fees are charged to homeowners. Those fees utilized to travel from a operation of spot taxes and h2o and discarded bills.

They volition present look solely connected h2o and discarded bills but volition beryllium larger: The mean residential location volition beryllium billed $254 a twelvemonth oregon garbage and recycling removal, a astir three-fold emergence from a budget-approved sum of $93 a year.