Great Lakes Water Authority bends to pressure, OKs lower water, sewer hikes

Detroit ― Dozens of residents pleaded with the Great Lakes Water Authority’s board Wednesday not to raise water and sewer rates in the upcoming fiscal year as families face high water bills and other financial concerns, but the board approved increases at slightly reduced levels.

After several hours of public comment, the six-member board voted unanimously to hike wholesale water and sewer rates for the 2027 fiscal year, though at smaller increases than proposed. Water rates will rise an average of 5.8%, while sewer rates will increase 4.26% after an audit committee Tuesday recommended reducing the original recommendations of a 6.83% hike for water and a 5.98% hike for sewers.

“We worked to balance affordability concerns with system needs to replace pipes over 100 years old,” said Great Lakes Water Authority board member Brian Baker, who represents Macomb County. “Including today’s charges, the average 10-year GLWA charge increase for water is 3% and less than 1.9% for sewer.”

More: Great Lakes Water Authority proposes water, sewer rate increases

Wednesday’s vote followed dozens of comments against the proposed hikes. Flint resident Cynthia Haynes asked the board to “take the time and pray” about the matter and not increase rates.

“Raising water rates, it’s going to hurt communities,” said Haynes, 56. “It’s going to hurt underserved communities. It’s going to hurt our children. It’s going to hurt families, because families are already broken and they’re already torn.”

The water authority serves roughly 4 million customers in 112 communities across eight counties in southeast Michigan. Earlier this year, it proposed a 6.83% rate hike for its water system and a 5.98% increase for its sewer system on average in fiscal year 2027, an almost 1 percentage point rise for water and a nearly 1.5 percentage point boost for sewers compared with last year’s increases.

But GLWA’s audit committee unanimously recommended to the authority’s board Tuesday to lower the proposed water increase by over 1 percentage point and sewer increase by 1.7, making the average water rate hike be 5.8% and the average sewer hike be 4.26%.

Suzanne Coffey, the chief executive officer of the Great Lakes Water Authority, told The Detroit News that the rate increases are being driven by factors including aging infrastructure, inflation and reduced investment income.

But dozens of residents from across Metro Detroit, including many from Flint, and some city officials, urged the authority’s board not to raise rates.

Nearly 30 people sat in the 5th Floor Board Room of the Water Board Building in Detroit, while 235 others were on Zoom after 1:30 p.m. Some speakers said water bills in their communities are already high, and some argued that the rate hikes fall on the backs of struggling residents.

Flint resident Rich Jones said in his city, some people had gathered in a meeting room to listen to the GLWA meeting.

“As a city, we stand against y’all raising our water rates,” Jones said.

GLWA explains the increases

Last year’s rate hikes marked the highest increases to the rates in a decade. The authority proposed increasing its wholesale water rates by an average of 7.73% and 5.39% for sewer rates for the 2026 fiscal year, which began July 1. But GLWA’s board bowed to public pressure at a late February 2025 meeting and reduced the increases, approving a 5.9% hike for water and a 4.5% rise for sewers.

Those approved rate hikes remained much higher than the approved increases of 3.25% for water and 3% for wastewater services from the year before. Water and sewer rate increases had been capped at 4% or under since the regional authority’s creation more than a decade ago, but the cap ended on June 30, 2025.

Coffey pointed to aging infrastructure.

“The age is showing, and it’s increasing in failures, and we’re seeing it more and more,” she said. “And so we have a lot of pressure on reliable service, high-level service.”

An unexpected failure of a weld on a 54-inch steel Detroit water main in February 2025 caused millions of dollars in damage in southwest Detroit. Water authority officials said last spring that they can’t inspect all 800 miles of their system, but they’re prioritizing areas based on a risk framework they use that weighs multiple factors.

“After we had the 54-inch break last year, we took a look at our prioritization ― what goes into how it is that we decide which pipes get taken care of first ― and we are going to continue and expand and make more robust that program,” Coffey said Wednesday.

Coffey said GLWA has an investment portfolio and “whatever return on that investment we get” offsets its water and sewer charges. She said that as interest rates decrease at the federal level, they expect their investment income to decline.

Resident raise concerns

Brooke Kimbrough of Detroit brought a stroller with her nearly 1-year-old daughter, Sage, to the podium at the meeting. Kimbrough told the board that “we have the opportunity to be a leader” in the region and in the country by supporting water affordability policies and practices that “identify that having water for everybody is a necessity.”

“I’m a doula, I’m a mother, I’m a pregnant person and I’m an environmental justice organizer,” she said, “and I’m sick and tired of seeing families struggling to decide if they want to pay their mortgage, if they’re going to pay their water bill, are they going to buy groceries, are they going to pay their DTE bill? We need to prioritize families over profits.”

“I’m really upset,” Haynes said after the vote.

She said when President Joe Biden ran for office, he emphasized infrastructure, but she thinks his administration should have done more.

“They didn’t do nothing for water,” she said.

Haynes urged forgoing the increases.

“You know, hold off until things get a little bit better,” she said. “People are really going through a lot mentally, emotionally, financially. We got this election.”

GLWA board members weigh in

The board approved GLWA’s budget for FY 2027 and FY 2028 as well as the corresponding FY 2027 water and wastewater service charges for its partner communities, the authority said in a press release.

Jaye Quadrozzi, GLWA Board of Directors vice chair and the board representative for Oakland County, said the board’s decision was driven by the desire to “keep rates as low as we possibly could” and the need for maintenance and capital improvements.

She said the GLWA Audit Committee, of which she is a member, met numerous times over the last two months and asked GLWA staff to work on lowering the rates.

“We challenge Ms. Bateson and her team and the executive staff to see whether or not … they could bring things down a little bit without affecting the quality or the reliability,” she said, referring to Nicolette Bateson, GLWA’s chief financial officer and treasurer. “And they did.”

Gary Brown, a member of the GLWA board and the director of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department, said during the meeting that with inflation recently, it’s “phenomenal that we’ve been able to keep the rates at this level” and still invest in infrastructure.

“We understand the affordability issues and trying to balance the affordability issue with the need to make our system more resilient and invest in our infrastructure,” he said.

asnabes@detroitnews.com