Water store owner struggles to pay sewer rates
$842.12.
That number leaped off the page when the city of Hollister’s
utility bill arrived at Keith Nance’s modest Hollister
business.
Nance is the sole proprietor of the Hollister Quality Water
store, which occupies a modest storefront in a strip center on
Airline Highway. Located hard against Staples, the place is
immaculate. Generous floor space is punctuated with water coolers
and gleaming high tech equipment.
Water store owner struggles to pay sewer rates
$842.12.
That number leaped off the page when the city of Hollister’s utility bill arrived at Keith Nance’s modest Hollister business.
Nance is the sole proprietor of the Hollister Quality Water store, which occupies a modest storefront in a strip center on Airline Highway. Located hard against Staples, the place is immaculate. Generous floor space is punctuated with water coolers and gleaming high tech equipment.
If the name does not spell it out, the place does. The store sells water. Once upon a time, tap water was considered to be the gold standard in America. But today, consumers who are dubious about water quality and who seek the clean, fresh taste of good water are willing to pay a little for the privilege.
At Hollister Quality Water, that privilege amounts to 40 cents per gallon, less if purchased on a regular customer card.
During a visit, a steady steam of customers entered the store, cleaned bottles and topped them off with what was once municipal water.
What comes out of the taps at Hollister Quality Water is a profoundly different commodity than what flowed into the building. And that’s by design. Nance monitored municipal water from King City to Morgan Hill, and the results were profound.
“I wanted to open somewhere where they cold really use it,” Nance, a resident of Salinas, said of his decision to open locally. “I went around and checked. Whoever has the worst water is where I was going to put my water store. Hollister was twice as bad as anywhere else.”
Indeed. Nance was checking his own water for “TDC’s” or total dissolved solids, on Wednesday. While the stuff he sells measured at zero, the stuff from the tap was running at 1,000 or more parts per unit. TDC measures the mineralization of water – traces of materials that may render water unpalatable.
Nance’s issue with his sewer bill is almost unique to his business.
Saddled with a state-imposed moratorium on new waste water hookups as the result of a 2002 spill of 15 million gallons of sewage into the San Benito River, the city is underwriting a public works project that dwarfs any undertaking in its history.
A $140 million waste water treatment plant is expected to be completed late next year, reopening the city to residential and commercial growth after six years of stagnation.
But somebody has to pay.
As a result, the city adopted an aggressive rate structure for waste water. But rather than monitoring what flows out of homes and businesses, the city bases sewer charges only on the water that flows in.
Which is what leaves Nance holding the bag on a very, very large bill.
Nance sells water. The city meters what flows in. But as the only employee of his business, what flows out is miniscule.
The elaborate filtration process he employs puts absolutely no salt into his wastewater. That’s an issue locally since the region’s notoriously mineralized – or hard – water is often “softened” with salt treatments that are back flushed into the wastewater system, where they may in turn leach into local farmlands.
Hollister Quality Water uses a reverse osmosis system, enhanced with ultraviolet and ozone cleaning systems that render water pure and bacteria free. Nance himself is licensed and the business is certified by the state Department of Health Services Food and Drug Division.
After years of trying to get someone – anyone – in the city to listen, a Hollister employee took a hard look at what happens at Hollister Quality Water. The report back was encouraging.
“[Danny Hillstock] told me that on a high level, maybe a half percent goes down the drain and that’s high. More realistically, it may be a quarter percent,” Nance said.
By down the drain, Nance means that cleaning water demands water. Some water, filled with minerals removed from the end product, must be flushed back into the system. But his system is so efficient that almost none does return to the system, as the city’s own report reveals.
“On a good day,” Nance said he sells 600 gallons of water.
Rising rent and other costs combined with the sewer rate he’s burdened with is threatening to put him out of business.
“This is just pennies for a city the size of Hollister,” he said. “For me, it’s life and death.”
While the average household income in Hollister is relatively high, many residents of the area commute long distances to jobs that allow them to afford to live there, and there’s little discretionary income left at the end of the month.
There’s the prospect of some relief coming from City Hall, however.
On Monday the Hollister City Council unanimously endorsed a measure to allow businesses to be assessed waste water fees based on a meter that monitors what flows out – not just what flows in.
But that is not about to satisfy Nance.
He claims no one at City Hall can tell him what it will cost to install a meter, or what the ongoing costs of having it monitored and calibrated will be. But the bottom line for Nance is justice.
“It’s not about getting a break,” he said. “It’s about doing what’s right. Charge me on that percentage ratio which was determined by the city’s own report.”
The notion that he might be asked to pay for the meter that will fix what he perceives to be a monthly injustice sticks in Nance’s throat.
“They’ve been overcharging me for more than four years,” he said. “Now they want me to pay?”
The problem is that Nance’s business – one that he says is regularly patronized by the same city and county government workers whose regulatory ennui frustrates him – is almost unique. Car washes routinely filter and recycle water. Coin-operated laundries generate a heavy waste water load, as do restaurants. But Nance’s stock goes to people who take it home where they cook or drink with it.
“All I get from the city is ‘our hands are tied. Just raise your prices,'” he said.
