Water and sewer rates for customers of Pennsylvania American Water are set to rise following approval from a state commission for the company to increase revenue by $74.9 million.<\/p>\n
The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission on Thursday approved the annual revenue increase \u2014 which was much smaller than the hike asked for by Pennsylvania American Water \u2014 to support ongoing critical infrastructure improvements.<\/p>\n
Those improvements include replacing aging infrastructure, expanding treatment for \u201cforever chemicals\u201d and continuing efforts to eliminate lead service lines.<\/p>\n
In Exeter Township and throughout Berks County, those investments include continued improvements to the Exeter wastewater system that help protect Heisters Creek, the Schuylkill River and surrounding waterways.<\/p>\n
Planned projects include the Exeter equalization tank and a new influent pump station designed to better manage wet-weather flows and reduce overflows. Once completed, these projects are expected to keep more than 7 million gallons of wastewater out of local waterways each year.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe record demonstrates that Pennsylvania American Water has provided meaningful assistance to troubled water and wastewater systems through acquisitions, receiverships and infrastructure improvements,\u201d PUC chairman Stephen M. DeFrank said in a statement announcing the decision. \u201cThese efforts have helped deliver safe, reliable service to customers and represent a public benefit that warrants recognition as part of the commission\u2019s consideration of management performance.\u201d<\/p>\n
The PUC approved a 4.75% annual revenue increase for Pennsylvania American Water\u2019s water operations and a 14.17% increase for its wastewater operations. The company has requested increases of 15% and 7.7%.<\/p>\n
If the company\u2019s requests would have been fully granted, its total revenue would have increased by about $159.5 million.<\/p>\n
Officials from Pennsylvania American Water, which serves more than 2.5 million people across the state, have not released information on how the approved increases will impact customers.<\/p>\n
A statement released Thursday states the company will provide further information when the order is received and its evaluation is complete.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Water and sewer rates for customers of Pennsylvania American Water are set to rise following approval from a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":67721,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[349,182,139,28,30,29,706],"class_list":["post-245793","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-pennsylvania","tag-berks-county","tag-local-news","tag-news","tag-pennsylvania","tag-pennsylvania-headlines","tag-pennsylvania-news","tag-top-stories-reg"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245793","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245793"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245793\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/67721"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245793"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245793"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245793"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}