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At the Honolulu Board of Water Supply, our mission is Water for Life - Ka Wai Ola.  It is at the core of what we do and provides the basis for our work.  Our goals are to sustain the island's water resources, maintain a healthy organization, and provide our people the tools and skills we need to serve our customers.

BWS provides a great value to customers - our rates are among the nation's lowest for communities of similar size, and they haven't risen in nearly 11 years.

At the same time, the costs of providing service have grown steeply - electrical power, construction materials, fuel, and labor costs continue to rise.

Our aging system also needs continued investment to keep it in operation.  The bulk of our pipelines are between 30 and 50 years old, and many are nearing the end of their expected service life.  Water utilities across the country are facing this same challenge.

The BWS has worked hard over the years to control costs and has been able to defer scheduled rate increases since 1995.  However, we can no longer afford to postpone rate increases.  Over the past year, we've studied our system needs and worked to define the true costs of providing water service.  The results tell us that we must raise rates to continue serving our customers.

To reduce impacts on customers, BWS has spread the needed increase over a multi-year rate schedule.  In the first year of this program, BWS is implementing a system-wide rate increase of 13 percent, which represents a $3.23 increase in the average residential customer's monthly charge.  This means the water rate will go from $1.77 to $2.00 for 1,000 gallons of water.  The new water rates will take effect on October 1, 2006.  BWS has timed this rate increase to take effect after the end of summer, when residential customers normally begin using less water.

At BWS, we work hard to sustain resources and control costs.  Our leak detection program has saved 1.5 million gallons of water a day in the Windward system alone.  We're producing 8 million gallons a day of recycled water, offsetting demands on groundwater.

In parallel, we looked at the portion of our annual operations budget that we can control, and we're constraining our fiscal year 2006 operations budget, exploring every opportunity to reduce costs.  We are committed to continuing to provide the best possible value to our customers.