People Don’t Like You Reaching In To Their Bank Account

Over the last year I’ve been involved in a community decision to upgrade a shared water system in our neighborhood out at the lake.  I had absolutely no idea what kind of high stakes drama I would be involved with when we made the decision to build our place out there.  In the last year I’ve seen grown men and women so angry that you’d think they were facing a life and death decision.  Guess what, to many of them, I think it is almost that painful.

Let me explain.  The community we live in has been around since the 60’s.  Back then a developer came in to a nice wooded tranquil area surrounding a beautiful lake in Washington state and subdivided the area in to 200 lots.  At that time he also dug a community well, installed water towers, and ran water to every lot in the neighborhood.  For over 40 years that water system has provided the community with fantastic drinking water.  I’m sure you can imagine what 40 years can do to anything.  It’s not surprising that the system is in need of some work.  The community has had to dig up the water main in multiple spots as roots have broken through the pipes and leaks have been discovered.  In this day of increased regulations we as a community also face upgraded rules for how to run a water system including things like having larger water mains and having hydrants that support higher gallon per minute flows for fire protection.

Over the last couple years the community board has done research and has received estimates for upgrading the system.  When it’s all said and done, each lot owner is going to have to pay around $3000.  Yeah, ouch.  Will I pay it?  Yes.  Will I complain?  Not so much.  You can imagine, though, how many other people in this rural community might not like the idea of coming up with that amount of money to invest in something that is still coming out of their faucet nice and clear.  If you are a lot owner that has multiple lots, simple math helps you come up with your total bill.  The cost is $3000 per original lot.  For those people that have 2 lots, their total price is $6,000.

Anyone that is faced with paying $3000 to continue to receive water flowing from their faucets is going to cringe a little bit.  Those people that are going to have to pay $6,000, $9,000 or even $36,000 are definitely going to have a bit of the pucker factor.  So I suppose it shouldn’t be too much of a surprise that each person will react in a different way.  My reaction is to suck it up and pay what’s needed.  If you’ve been reading my blog for long you know that I don’t exactly freely wield my checkbook around slaying bills with no consideration of the cost.  The reality is that I am comfortable with the due diligence that has been done and believe we just need to get it done so that we can have a clean solid reliable water system for another 40 years.  It will help me while I own the property and should help the property maintain it’s value in the long run (as opposed to losing our water rights).

Other people don’t have that opinion.  Some of them don’t want to do anything.  They believe there are still a number of years left before the state would force the upgrade and they believe that the community should continue to pay the 10’s of thousands each year to fix the breaks in the system.  There is also the belief that hundreds of thousands of gallons are leaking out of the system each year due to unknown leaks.  That’s okay with these folks too.

In the end, I think we’ll probably see the system replaced this year but it hasn’t been without a lot of stress, anger, frustration and disagreement.  I guess it’s just par for the course whenever a large group of people shares one resource.