Abbeville: 3% increase on water pushed to March 1

By ordinance, a 3% increase for customers of the city of Abbeville’s water system goes into effect each Jan. 1.
After issues with the recent hard freeze, city officials have moved that increase to March 1.
“Automatically, we have an increase on Jan. 1,” Mayor Roslyn White said during Tuesday’s regular city council meeting. “We should postpone it, just to not have it applicable to those people who had frozen pipes in December.”
As of Tuesday, the city had isolated 170 leaks from the freezing temperatures during the Christmas weekend. Many of those leaks occurred on private properties.
“Our meter readers were out today,” White said. “Already, we are seeing extremely high uses in some cases. Of course, a lot of that is because of broken pipes. Some of that is from people running their taps.”
White said the 3% increase is something that needs to remain.
“The cost of running our water and sewer plant increases by far more than that a year,” White said, “but we thought it would be in the best interest of the citizens to postpone that annual increase taking effect.”
Councilman Francis Touchet Jr. said pushing the date to March 1 is important.
“There are going to be high bills,” Touchet said. “Maybe this gives a little reprieve on that.”
Touchet also referenced recent legislation that could possibly allow the city to not tie the sewer rate to the water rate in instances where leaks occurred. White said the city is already looking into whether that can be applied to this situation.
“There is a law that passed last year that is for certain cases of emergency,” White explained, “This was not a declared emergency, but we are researching what we can do. We have the team looking at that, and we will bring it back to this council as soon as we have the answer on what we legally can do.”
During Tuesday’s meeting, White provided a thorough timeline of the freeze and the city’s water outage. Between Dec. 24-27, the outage time totaled four hours and 10 minutes. The city lifted its boil water advisory at 11 a.m. on Dec. 30. As of Dec. 31, 62 public waters systems
throughout the state were still under advisory. Nearly 200 around the state had to go under boil advisories.
White said many in the city went “above and beyond” during those few days.
“It took the entire team working through their Christmas holiday to make sure we were not out of the water for more than four hours and 10 minutes in four days,” White said. “They do deserve appreciation for the work they did.”
Marie Butaud, the city’s water plant superintendent, said preparation began before freezing temperatures arrived.
“I would like to reassure the people of Abbeville that we didn’t start working when the freeze happened,” Butaud said during the meeting. “We were making plans days before.”
Public Works Director Chris Gautreaux said there will be lessons learned from this that will be applied in the future.
“We want to get better from this,” Gautreaux said. “You always want to get better and learn.”
Part of that will be creating a freeze plan, including communication with Abbeville General and other facilities.
“We are working on that and will make everyone aware of it when we have it,” White said.
Plans will certainly be put in place to help during any future events. However, this one proved to be something not really seen by many before.
“The way those towers plummeted was unprecedented,” Butaud said of the water levels. “I’ve never seen anything like it, and I’ve been here 18 years.”