Meridian to raise water rates October 1st
MERIDIAN, Miss. (WTOK) — Residents of Meridian will see a change in their water bills coming very soon.
Rates are set to rise by 7 percent starting October 1st, with a flat recovery fee of 3 dollars for water, and 10 dollars for sewer.
This is down from the 9 percent increase that has been seen for the past 5 years.
Mayor Percy Bland says the fees are necessary to keep improving the city’s aging water and sewer infrastructure.
“We need those fees based on our actuaries and the people who communicated to myself and the council and they gave us three options to choose and the council unanimously chose that option so that we could recover enough revenue to fund the projects that we still have with this consent decree,” said Bland.
This rate increase was passed back in October of 2025, with a 5-0 council vote.
The money goes back into projects like Meridian’s ongoing water and sewer consent decree, replacing aging and failing infrastructure.
“We’ve completed close to $40 million worth of work already. We’re in the process of moving forward with another 50-million-dollar bond to continue on this work,” said Bland. “That money isn’t all just coming from the city of Meridian, we have been working with our federal and state delegation. We have received over $50 million over the last four or five years to help in some of that funding, which offsets the cost to our rate payers.”
Public Works director David Hodge says collaboration and connection with state and federal leadership has also helped pull in money for the water and sewer modernization in the Queen City.
“We’ve been very proactive in searching for other ways to help pay for this other than through our water and sewer rates. We’ve been very fortunate working with our federal and state delegation over the last several years, especially the last 15, 16 months, and we’ve been meeting often with these different constituents,” said Hodge.
“We’ve actually been very successful, been awarded almost 20 million in the last couple of years in funding through what’s called the Water Resource Development Act, the WRDR bill, and we have working relationships now with the Corps of Engineers out of Mobile.”
Again, these rate changes go into effect October 1st.