‘Can't Do It All At Once:’ Long Beach DPW Updates On Water District Projects

LONG BEACH, NY — The cost of water in a city surrounded by it has been a topic of discussion at multiple Long Beach City Council meetings this fall, as city officials attempt to keep the department running with a depleted fund balance and a budget deficit.

For residents of the city, however, help could be on the way: City officials said Wednesday that they're roughly 30 percent of the way through replacing residential water meters in the city.

The discussions came on the heels of price hikes in Long Beach water, which rose from $129.17 per-household, per-quarter in the 2024 fiscal year to $133 in fiscal year 2025 and is expected to rise to $142.51. In an October presentation, City Manager Dan Creighton outlined a “drastic need for capital expenditures” in the water district. Those needed expenditures, Creighton said, included water main replacement, new wells, well repairs, repairs to current water mains, and an electronic well water operation and monitoring service. Some of that infrastructure work, Creighton said, would have been done elsewhere in the 1980s but still has not been done in Long Beach.

In a Wednesday conversation, acting Department of Public Works Commissioner Ken Arnold said some of the needed work is already ongoing, with the city working to replace pipes that date back to its development in the early 1900s. Arnold said the city has done replacements on between 10 and 15 blocks, with the average city block measuring roughly 750 feet. The city, Arnold said, contains roughly 55 miles of water infrastructure.

“The old pipes are…at the end of their useful life. So the city has had a program for many years where the water pipes are getting replaced as we do road reconstruction projects,” Arnold said. “We're proactively replacing pipes. So, to give you an idea of replacing a water main right for a typical block in this city is probably $300,000. That’s the pipe, the road reconstruction is probably the same number. We do sewer at the same time. So you're probably talking, a typical block is about 1.3 to $1.5 million.”

Also in progress is work to replace residential water meters, which the city began replacing in May as part of a $4,639,655 project. Some of that has been funded by the state, which awarded the city a $2 million grant in 2021 for water meter replacement. While Arnold said the city has applied for additional grant funding since the 2021 award, that grant remains the only one applied to Long Beach water meters.

“That's ongoing, and that's a multi-million dollar project,” Arnold said.

The replacements, city officials said, are offered to residents at no additional cost and are scheduled to interrupt water service for less-than a half-hour. As far as scheduling the replacements, Arnold said the city is working in zones.

“Right now, it's simple,” Arnold said. “Some people have not been called yet, because we're working through a zone process. So right now we notify an area of the city, I think we're getting like 70 percent feedback, and those are the meters that are getting done."

Finally, the city is also in the process of replacing two of the 10 sand filters at its water treatment plant, at a total price of $1,231,850.

While city officials said the work of replacing filters, pipes and meters is straightforward, the biggest challenge is running the construction on a budget.

“It's managing the capital budget, you know? You can't do it all at once.” Arnold said. “So it's [a question of] how much can we program a year? You know, if money was an unlimited resource, you still couldn’t do it all at once, because you can't disturb the whole city.”

The Long Beach water district has made headlines for its budget management in recent years, as the city drew down its water fund balance from a high of $1.9 million to $355,000. That effort, city officials have said, was made to keep water bills down after taxes increased in 2023..

“When they gave a 10 percent tax increase in 2023, they obviously could not increase the water rates, so they used the water fund to subsidize,” City Council President Brendan Finn said at the Oct. 21 meeting. “They kept the price down for the residents — okay, we were grateful for that — but they decimated the water fund.”

Creighton called the state of the water fund balance “pretty disgusting” during that meeting. Those financial constraints, Arnold said, haven’t trickled down to the DPW.

“It didn't change anything I am doing,” Arnold said of the fund balance decrease. “This administration, the needs are presented, and then the City Council approved those needs this year.”

While the capital budget is the main constraint on the city’s water infrastructure work, Arnold said there are also limits placed on the water district by the nature of Long Beach’s economy. With massive crowds coming to town every weekend between Memorial Day and Labor Day, Arnold said the calendar for when work can be done is shortened.

“This being a seaside seasonal community, certain things you don't want to do during certain seasons,” Arnold said. “You can complete a project like this in the offseason, so you can do this work in the winter time. It's not winter limited, but you really don't want to, in many of these areas, do this work in the Summer, because you're ruining people's livelihood.”

In addition to water meter replacement, city officials expect to solicit bids for a $5 million project to replace WALKS area water mains next Spring. They also plan to put a $300,000 project out to bid in Spring of 2027 that would replace mains on East Pine Street, followed in 2028 by bids for a $600,000 water main replacement on Riverside Drive.