"Nobody Wants A Water Rate Increase:" Long Beach City Council Presents Water Rate Updates

LONG BEACH, NY. — City Manager Daniel Creighton gave Long Beach residents a presentation complete with updates on the city's water department at the city council’s Oct. 21 meeting.

The presentation featured data on increases to water rates that officials said became necessary after the city's water fund reached levels the city manager called, "disgusting."

The water fund was drawn down from over $1.8 million to just over $355,000 in recent years in order to keep residents’ water rates down. The city manager said the decrease is now causing issues for the water department’s management, necessitating a rate hike. At the time of the draw down, the city’s plan was to implement new water meters to generate the necessary income to replenish the city water fund. The installation of those meters, however, was delayed, he said.

“I cannot explain why this was done prior to my arrival, but this is why rate increases were inevitable,” Creighton said at the meeting. “With only $355,000 in the water fund balance —operating at, by the way, at a deficit of $1.2 million, which is impossible to operate the water and everybody would be without water—I just want to point that out, you cannot operate a $1.2 million deficit on $355,000 that we were left with in this account."

He added: "Rate increases were necessary to pay the increasing salaries for 24-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week operation that requires licensed operators. So we have to have people that are qualified to operate the water and sewer fund. . . Nobody wants a water rate increase; all of us up here are residents of the city, and this affects us as much as all of you."

Exacerbating the concerns about the city’s water fund is the fact that, as Creighton said in his presentation, capital projects to the city’s water system are paid out of that fund balance. The list of capital improvements funded through the water fund includes electronic well water operation and monitoring, new wells, sand filter replacements, water main replacements and well repairs.

That electronic monitoring, Creighton said, allows the city to adjust water flow and pull from varying wells at different times if issues with water quality arise at an individual well. The city manager called it "something that probably would have been done in the 1980s but still hasn’t been done here."

Creighton said the average household bill per-quarter over the past three years went from $129.17 in the 2024 fiscal year to $133 in fiscal year 2025 and is expected to rise to $142.51. The average household in this case was defined as using about or under 12,000 gallons of water per-quarter, a figure applying to roughly 5,000 households in the city. While water bills alone have increased, Creighton specified that increases in water bills have been accompanied by decreases in sewer bills.

John McNally of the City’s public relations department said in a conversation Tuesday that the process of installing the water meters was still ongoing.

“I mean, replacing 8,000 water meters doesn’t happen in a day,” McNally said, adding that he couldn’t speak on why the meter installation had been delayed in earlier years.