Winnipeg water and sewer rate hike clears first hurdle
Garbage and recycling fees also on the rise
A proposal to raise water-and-sewer rates in Winnipeg by $18.67 a month to keep pace with the growing cost of sewage-treatment upgrades cleared its first hurdle at city hall on Monday.
City council's water, waste and environment committee voted 3-1 to hike water-and-sewer rates for the final nine months of 2025, but hold off on making even larger hikes in 2026 and 2027 to allow city staff to find other means of funding the city's share of the next phase of its $3-billion wastewater upgrade.
Coun. Sherri Rollins (Fort Rouge-East Fort Garry) voted against the hike, on the basis the city made its rate-hike recommendations after council approved the city's budget for the year.
The rate hike, which still faces approval from executive policy committee and city council, would increase the average residential water and sewer bill in Winnipeg from $1,308 a year to to $1,476 for 2025.
Winnipeg's water and waste department recommended council increase this year's tab to $1,532 and then raise rates to result in annual bills of $1,968 in 2026 and $2,308 in 2027.
Water, waste and environment committee chair Coun. Ross Eadie (Mynarksi) said last week these hikes are too much for homeowners to bear.
Water and sewer rates have been rising for decades to help the city pay for its wastewater-treatment upgrades.
The province ordered the upgrades in 2003 to reduce the flow of phosphorus and nitrogen from Winnipeg sewage treatment plants and combined sewers into the city's rivers — and eventually into Lake Winnipeg, where high concentrations of phosphorus, in particular, spawn algae blooms.
The city has already upgraded the city's two smaller sewage-treatment plants, the West End and South End water pollution control centres.
It is now in the midst of upgrading its largest sewage-treatment plant, the North End Water Pollution Control Centre. Work is nearly complete on the first phase of the project, which involves new headworks at the plant. The city will next build a new facility to treat biosolids, which is partly treated black sludge from all three sewage treatment plants.
The final phase of the project is a facility that will remove phosphorus and nitrogen from the effluent discharged from the plant into the Red River.
This work will not eliminate algae blooms on Lake Winnipeg. When all the phases of the upgrades are complete, Winnipeg's share of the total volume of algae-spawning nutrients that end up in Lake Winnipeg will only be whittled down by a single percentage point, from five per cent to four per cent.
It is also engaged in a multi-decade process of replacing combined sewers — which carry both storm water and sewage — with separate pipes devoted to land drainage and sewage treatment.
In a separate vote, the water, waste and environment committee approved a plan to divert a dividend city hall used to draw on water and sewer revenues to ward the cost of the sewage-treatment upgrades.
Winnipeg used to rely on this dividend to help balance its budget.
The committee also approved a plan to change the way garbage and recycling fees are charged to homeowners. Those fees used to come from a combination of property taxes and water and waste bills.
They will now appear solely on water and waste bills but will be larger: The average residential home will be billed $254 a year or garbage and recycling removal, a nearly three-fold rise from a budget-approved sum of $93 a year.
