Prudence Water District workshop on taxing power this Saturday

The Prudence Island Water District will hold a workshop on implementing their taxing authority this Saturday at 1pm the Union Church, according to a news release.

After research, discussion of options and careful consideration over the past year, the Board of the Prudence Island Water District intends to implement use of its taxing authority effective with passage of the Fiscal Year 2018 Budget. The District has had the authority to tax real property within the District since its creation through legislative action in 2004. However, the District has never implemented this authority and instead relied exclusively on collection of semi-annual water service fees to pay for all operating expenses, capital expenses and debt service.

During the past year, the District has reviewed its taxing authority and the need for additional debt service as part of this long-term plan to continue improving not only its water quality and upgrading its infrastructure, but to also increase potential capacity for new customers (including redundancy of supply to respond to temporary interruptions in the availability of one or more wells), as well as improve the accessibility and quantity of water available for fire fighting within the District.

The Board has concluded that these projects will equally benefit not only its water customers, but also the property owners within the District that are not currently purchasing water service from the district. The Board feels that it is unfair to place the full financial burden of these system improvements solely on current water users when they benefit all property owners within the District. Therefore, the District intends to move to a budget that is based on funding operations with a combination of water service fees and debt service through a District wide tax on real property. This funding structure is common practice in water districts throughout the State of Rhode Island.

The Board has scheduled the second of two public informational workshops to present this change to property owners within the District. The workshop will be held:

July 29, 2017
from one o'clock to two o'clock at
Union Church
3 Pier Road, Prudence Island

Full implementation of the budgetary decision and setting of the tax rate will occur when the Board adopts its budget for fiscal year 2018 (October 1, 2017 to September 30, 2018) at its monthly Board meeting on September 16, 2017.

Editorial note: Written from a news release.