San Antonio City Council on Thursday voted 6-5 on Thursday to postpone a vote and further discussion on a proposed rate hike by San Antonio Water Systems (SAWS) until October.
Some of those who voted to push back said they did so because they don’t fully trust the current leadership of the city-owned utility.
If it had passed, SAWS’s proposed rate increase would have driven up the average water bill for a San Antonio resident by some $230 annually by 2029. Supporters of the proposal, including Mayor Gina Ortiz Jones, maintain the change is needed to finance more than $3 billion in infrastructure improvements that have been delayed for decades.
“These improvements will cost more the longer we wait,” Jones told her colleagues.
Even so, some on council took issue with SAWS CEO Robert Puente, who earned more than $700,000 last year in base pay and bonuses, and what they argued was his mismanagement of the utility.
Distinct 10 Councilman Marc Whyte called out the utility for its loss of 16 billion gallons of water last year, citing it as a sign of mismanagement.
“I don’t believe the evidence is there to make any council member feel confident that the numbers have been crunched as they should have, that the money SAWS has spent in the past has been wisely spent, or that the revenue generated by a potential rate increase will be wisely spent in the future.”
Meanwhile, District 2 Councilman Jalen McKee-Rodriguez, who described his interactions with Puente as “snippy,” took issue with the CEO’s past decision to cut water off to apartment complex owners who were late on their water bills, affecting hundreds of tenants.
“It made me incredibly angry at the time,” McKee-Rodriguez said. “It was not the only approach SAWS could have made, but it was the most convenient, though one of the most inhumane.”
District 1 Councilwoman Sukh Kaur, on the other hand, focused on SAWS’s lack of communication with business owners and residents about utility improvement projects, which she said were frequently behind schedule.
“I went through all of the cases that our constituents have called us about,” Kaur said. “There’s been 103 cases over the last couple of years around SAWS [construction] issues.”
Kaur, McKee-Rodriguez and Whyte joined District 4 Councilman Edward Mungia, District 7 Councilwoman Marina Alderete Gavito and District 9’s Misty Spears in voting to postpone the vote and further discussion.
Alderete Gavito, Spears and Whyte also are calling for an audit of the utility’s operations and spending before then.
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