With each additional gallon of water Westminster residents use, they pay less.
The town wants to reverse that so residents save money by conserving water.
Westminster has hired Annapolis-based Municipal & Financial Services Group to study water rates over the next three months to see how they can be overhauled to charge less for residents who use less.
“They will evaluate and assess kind of where we are now and where we can go,” said Jeffrey Glass, the town?s acting public works director. “Right now, conservation is not big in our water structure, meaning the more water you use, you?re charged less.”
The county seat imposed restrictions in August, banning residents from watering lawns, using outdoor sprinklers and washing cars.
But conservation has hardly caught on. Months into the restrictions, reservoir levels continued to drop.
Only recently, as the winter months set in, have levels risen a foot in the Cranberry Reservoir, said Mayor Tom Ferguson.
It is 66 percent full, 8 feet below its 24-foot capacity.
But the reservoir needs to continue rising about another 6 feet for restrictions to be dropped, and Ferguson doesn?t expect that to happen for another few months.
“We?re not out of the woods by any stretch of the imagination,” he said.
Glass said he expected the company to come back to the town with two rate structures, one for industries and one for residents, that take into account residents? varying incomes.
A long-term solution could be a seven-mile pipeline connecting Cranberry Reservoir to Medford Quarry. It would provide an influx of water to stave off droughts like the one that scorched Carroll County and the Eastern Shore last summer.
Ferguson said a bid for the project could come before the Westminster Common Council in December.
Carroll should be Maryland?s fastest-growing county, the state has predicted. But county officials are quick to add one disclaimer: It will grow only as much as its diminishing water supply allows.
Carroll?s 20-year blueprint for development has stalled over uncertainty about the county?s dwindling water supply.
