I understand your disgust with your water rates. I am a water customer too. The cause of most of all this is what I have discussed through this web site and why I am running. And that is the lack of commercial business in Springtown. All Towns and cities raise funds in the same ways. The city gets money from your property taxes, your water, sewer, trash bill. The city gets funds from fees and fines and grants when available. The one thing that keeps all the other things I just mentioned low or at least reasonable is sales tax revenue from commercial and industrial business. I’m not talking about a few restaurants around town and one grocery store. Obviously that is not enough business in Springtown to level the playing field between residential customers and commercial business customers. When you have a situation like this, lack of sales tax revenue, the greater burden of paying for services (water, sewer, trash p/u, police, roads, libraries and other amenities we don’t have) in Springtown falls onto the residential costumer. Springtown MUST follow the plan that I have laid out or the city will have no choice but to raise property taxes and water rates just to keep up and pay for the level of service that you have now. Services cost money and the user of that service must pay. Just what you pay depends on how many and what kind of customers a city has. Residential, commercial, or industrial customers all have different rates. Commercial and industrial are higher rates because they use more and put more of a burden on the system leading one to conclude that the more commercial and industrial business a city has the less the residents have to pay just to live in Springtown. Historically, most of leaders of previous administrations in Springtown have run off every real commercial or industrial company because they didn’t want anyone else moving here. I am not of that mindset. I and this council have inherited problem within Springtown with our water plant, sewer plant unmaintained roads and other things that should have been handled by previous administrations. I’m not complaining I’m just trying to address the problems. Some of these problems took many years of a lack of maintenance and neglect of the cities infrastructure. Since I have been on the council we have invested 1.2 million upgrading the water plant and another 900,000 upgrading the wastewater treatment plane and about to invest another 3 to 5 million into the wastewater treatment planet. It cost so must because of the precious years of neglect and lack of regular maintenance. Your water is safe to drink out of the facet. I drink it every day. But, I understand why you feel the way you do. The issue we had with the water plant where the city was mandated by the TCEQ to send you notices has been fixed. But, by TCEQ rules the city must continue to send notices out to all water customers for one year after the TCEQ has approved the cities water supply, and they did. I also understand the many times that we had to reverse call you and tell you to boil your water because of a water break. We are mandated by the state to notify you to boil your water when we have a water break and anything gets into the lines. This gets back to old water lines and lack of maintenance and replacement where needed and over time. Today we are playing catch up and it going to take some time and a fair amount of money. This is where the commercial business comes back into play. Where we can get more sales tax revenue to pay for these things the less we have to take from you. Your property taxes for the city of Springtown are .060 per one hundred dollar value. In Lake Worth they pay, the last time I looked, .038 per one hundred dollar valuation. It’s all because of the large amount of commercial business. Lake Worth can afford to keep taxes and water bills low. But they also have a higher crime rate than we do but the businesses are paying for the extra police and security, there’s always a tradeoff. If elected your new mayor on May 14 I will do everything I can to keep the service rates and fees for residential customers in Springtown from increasing by using the Mayors’ office to bring the needed commercial and industrial business to Springtown. I hope I have addressed your question to you satisfaction If not let me know and I would be glad to sit down with you and go over anything you want about the city in more detail at your convenience. And would be glad to hear any suggestion that you have on how the city could improve how we do business. Tom Clayton 
Posted at: 11:07 PM | Add Comment
