City residents are on track to pay more for water, wastewater and other utilities starting Oct. 1, marking the sixth consecutive year St. Petersburg has raised these rates — even as council members debate a series of alternative revenue schemes that could shift costs elsewhere without necessarily lowering the overall tax burden on residents.
City Council advanced the proposed increases Aug. 13, covering water, wastewater, reclaimed water, sanitation and stormwater services. Combined, the hikes would add roughly 7% to the average bill, an estimated $8 to $10 more per month for a single-family home. A final public hearing and vote are set for Aug. 27, with new rates taking effect Oct. 1 if approved.
City officials defend the utility increases as necessary to maintain aging infrastructure and avoid costlier emergency repairs down the road — the standard justification municipalities offer for recurring rate hikes, though six straight years of increases raise a fair question about whether the city’s underlying spending and planning are keeping costs in check or simply passing them along to ratepayers year after year.
Council member Corey Givens was the lone dissenting vote on the stormwater and sanitation increases, arguing the city should exhaust outside funding options before returning to residents’ wallets. “People are already burdened financially, and I don’t think it’s fair for ratepayers to strain their resources,” Givens said. He indicated he could support the package only if it were scaled back to a 2-3% increase — less than half of what’s currently on the table.
Rather than simply cutting spending or finding efficiencies, however, council members are floating alternative ways to generate revenue, several of which quietly shift the burden rather than reduce it. Vice Chair Richie Floyd is pushing to raise the city’s “water closet fee” — a charge on new toilets added by residential and commercial development — from its current $1,000 rate, framing it as making developers “carry their weight.” Givens didn’t disagree in principle but noted the city’s limited buildable land means that revenue stream has real ceilings: “St. Pete is landlocked, we can only build so many new units, so I don’t know how much revenue that is going to provide to meet the needs.”
More notable is Floyd’s separate proposal to reduce the annual transfer of utility revenue into the city’s general fund — money currently collected through a mechanism called Payment in Lieu of Taxes, or PILOT, which functions similarly to the property taxes a private utility would otherwise owe. To offset the resulting hole in the general fund, Floyd suggested the city simply freeze its millage rate rather than let it decline as property values rise — a maneuver that, in practice, functions as a tax increase on property owners even without a formal vote to raise the rate itself. Floyd called the shift more “equitable,” but a frozen millage rate collects more property tax revenue automatically as home values climb, regardless of whether anyone frames it as a hike.
Council member Mike Harting raised a related concern, noting the costs under any of these proposals don’t simply disappear — they land somewhere else, often on renters who have no direct stake in the property tax debate. “Costs will still be pushed onto renters,” Harting said. “I struggle with how other residents won’t inevitably pay for this service.”
The millage freeze proposal isn’t part of the Aug. 27 vote and would require a separate discussion during a future budget cycle — but it signals that even if residents fend off this year’s utility hikes, City Hall has more than one lever available to keep revenue climbing.
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