Guest Column: Water Users’ Board Policy is Discriminatory

— Lesley Liddle —

The [Eastsound Water Users Association (EWUA)] Guest House Initiative remains in my mind an unjustified discriminatory surtax which will affect some long time small water users who happen to have guest apartments inside modest homes or nearby on their property, usually created as small spillover units for elderly parents or caregivers. These are very small secondary housing units I am talking about. Many of these units end up housing a solitary person who cannot afford other housing.

As I have said several times in other letters, this initiative discriminates against those who have this situation while it favors and protects those who may have very high water use but live in a mansion with wet bars, extra bedrooms, extra baths, some with enormous kitchens, but without actually separate “guest” houses. It is not possible for this initiative to be fair as it is presently written, which is probably why it has sat on the books and never been enacted before now, and which is why it should be either tossed out or revised to address the actual fact of water OVER usage of a tax parcel. In other words this initiative should ONLY ever be enforced if a particular property is in fact PROVED to be using an excessive amount of water, more than one would expect from a single family home over a period of time. That is a pretty simple concept, and it is logical, and would prove fair to a pretty major extent.

Once again I am left with this thought: No matter what we agree on as to equal or proactive monthly water rates for all, the guest house initiative as it stands is discriminatory and will unfairly place a surtax upon those actually low water users who happen to live in two small rather than one large unit on their property. Perhaps this flaw in the initiative could be addressed by examining each property, knowing and setting a statistically relevant maximum (conservative) number of gallons allowed for ONE average family home, if there is such a thing, after which any property with an extra dwelling or using substantially more than their single family “share” of water is subject to extra meters and monthly fees.

Perhaps another idea might be measuring the actual size of the second living unit in square footage. The size of the “guest” house would then indicate whether or not this unit should either be considered an extra “average” family home meaning it contained one or more bedrooms or should be considered to be just a small spillover apartment –  which WHEN ADDED to the number of bedrooms and baths of the primary house would still fall into a “single average family home” category. As an example, my own property, part of the original old Buckhorn Resort,  has a 1929 one bedroom one bath primary cabin and a separate 400 sq ft  half bath studio apartment on it.

I would imagine that an average American home would contain two bedrooms and two baths and have an average square footage of around 1500 square feet, and that is probably very conservative. In the last decade mega mansions have been popping up everywhere probably skewering this. Nevertheless this example shows that adding BOTH my primary and my extra housing unit I don’t even meet the standard size of an older average size family home.

The original Initiative amendment is not well thought out and enforcing it will cause those with small houses to believe the surtax to be discriminatory. My suggestion is that everybody who owns a single property pay one monthly fee guaranteeing water service to the property line, and that fee should – as it already does – cover most of the overall maintenance of the Eastsound water system. Adding a monthly charge to each property for every gallon of water used in a tier promoting conservation of water, solves the problem of discrimination and overall fairness, fewer are going to be complaining, and bookkeeping and such related matters would greatly simplify.