City Council Adjusts Water/Sewer Rate, Changes Industrial Billing
At its January 12 regular meeting, the Hermiston City Council approved a resolution updating the City’s Master Fee Schedule, including changes to water and sewer utility rates and adjusting how industrial sewer customers are billed.
The approved resolution includes a 2.34% increase to water and sewer rates, consistent with the City’s long-standing policy of making annual adjustments that closely track inflation. For a median residential customer, the change will result in an average monthly increase of about $2.72. The actual dollar impact varies for each customer depending on use.
Hermiston adjusts utility rates annually to help ensure stable and predictable rates while maintaining the long-term financial health of the City’s water and wastewater systems. The City bases these adjustments on the Engineering News-Record Construction Cost Index (ENR CCI), which reflects changes in construction-related costs such as labor and materials.
Beginning in 2021, City Council adopted the practice of using a three-year average of the ENR CCI to level out the impact of unusually high and low inflation years. While construction inflation increased significantly in late 2025, lower inflation in prior years results in a three-year average increase of 2.34% for 2026, which is below current construction cost inflation levels.
The resolution also changes how industrial sewer customers are billed for organic material in wastewater that directly affects operating costs at the treatment plant. Currently, Hermiston has one industrial sewer customer whose charges are calculated using an average of multiple samples. City staff identified concerns that predictable sampling schedules may not accurately reflect peak discharges and that rates paid by the company were not covering costs at the wastewater treatment plant.
Under the approved change, industrial users will be billed based on the highest sample recorded each month rather than an average. This approach better aligns costs with actual system capacity requirements and helps prevent the cost of maintaining treatment capacity for industrial discharges from being shifted to other ratepayers. To allow time for planning and potential on-site treatment improvements, the change will take effect January 1, 2027.
Video of the January 12 meeting and a staff report on the resolution are available on the city website.
