Re: How does your community divide up water bills? | <– Date –> <– Thread –> |
From: Sharon Villines (sharonsharonvillines.com) | |
Date: Sun, 21 May 2017 09:49:29 -0700 (PDT) |
> On May 20, 2017, at 5:31 PM, Ken Winter <ken [at] sunward.org> wrote: > > Our cohousing community (like probably many others) gets a single bill from > the utility for all of its water usage. There are no water meters on > individual units. Ours does the same. Water and gas are both included in the operating budget and paid as part of the monthly condo fee. The fee is charged proportionately to units on a formula based 50% equally per unit and 50% variable depending roughly on the size of the unit. Ken, all the information you have collected about various schemes should be posted somewhere for new communities to use to understand the ins and outs. Part of the reason for not setting up individual accounts with the utilities is that each account then has a minimum fee and usage amount that is larger than many households use and certainly larger than single person households use. By having one bill, everyone pays less than if they had individual accounts. We have geothermal heating so those costs are electric. We each have our own account for electricity. Water usage would be hard to balance because some people use the CH laundry and others have machines at home. Some participate in meals using a lot of CH resources and some don’t. In a community with ~100 residents, these can be large variables. In the 1990s, the design of cohousing communities was a celebration of sharing and caring and diversity. Ordinary condos were viewed as rigid and divisive. They distinguished amenities by size of unit and isolated unit sizes in different buildings. In almost 10 years of trying to make charges for maintenance of limited common elements proportionate, I’ve learned that there is a reason why buildings are designed as all 1 bedrooms with balconies, or all three bedroom with a balcony and front porch. All two bathrooms or all one bathroom. All have garages or charge for each garage. Laundry inside all units or outside all units. It’s easier to apportion costs in a way that has some relationship to use. We wanted it all to balance out and not be nit-piky about things. But people are more aware of what they are using if they can see the numbers — measurement. Trying to lower one big collective measurement breeds suspicion and blame because one person is inevitably viewed as using more than another person. Individually measuring is more likely to produce both individual awareness of usage and clear ability to reduce usage. Sharon ---- Sharon Villines Takoma Village Cohousing, Washington DC http://www.takomavillage.org
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How does your community divide up water bills? Ken Winter, May 20 2017
- Re: How does your community divide up water bills? R Philip Dowds, May 21 2017
- Re: How does your community divide up water bills? Sharon Villines, May 21 2017
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How does your community divide up water bills? Fred H Olson, May 21 2017
- Re: How does your community divide up water bills? Sharon Villines, May 21 2017
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Re: How does your community divide up water bills? David Heimann, May 22 2017
- Re: How does your community divide up water bills? Sharon Villines, May 22 2017
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