Right Idea, Wrong Solution, Still Beggin' The Question

The DuPage Water Commission is receiving suggestions on how to expend the $100 million surplus. The City Council of Naperville recently voted to have the Commission rebate some $40 million to municipalities. The concept, as I read it, is to give the money back to the taxpayer. Giving the money back to the taxpayer, I am on board. As in my previous post on the subject, I still have concerns.

1. The newspaper articles have not laid out how taxpayers who do not receive lake water will receive their fair share. If it is given back by rate cuts to lake water users only, it is essentially a subsidy to the users taken from those not hooked up to lake water.
2. The 1/4% sales tax on all of DuPage was to fund the Commission and its work to bring lake water to DuPage. Again, it seems unfair to me if my daughter buys a $10.00 toy, that she has to pay 2 1/2 cents extra for some guy to over-water his lawn. Just to be clear, providing clean drinking water to the public is a government responsibility and is an appropriate reason for a tax. Forcing other people to pay for the water someone else wants to use... not so much.
3. Getting back to over-watering the lawn, in light of the predicted water shortage in the western suburbs, a reduction in water rates is a bad idea to refund the money. It is not an equitable distribution of the money. It rewards large volume water users, provides an incentive to waste water, but does not provide incentive or reward to the person that conserves water. If we insist on returning the money by way of the water bill, a one-time reduction of x amount in the bill would make more sense. Everyone would receive the same amount. This doesn't really reward the person conserving water, but it does eliminate the incentives to waste water beyond the incentive provided by a one-time windfall of cash.
4. If we are expecting a water shortage, wouldn't it be wiser to increase the regional fresh water capacity with some of the money?
5. Since the Commission was able to send the $75 million to DuPage County and still amass a significant surplus in recent years, I still come to what I previously wrote: All of this begs the question "Do we still need a sales tax if we are constantly building significant surpluses?" Perhaps we should discontinue the tax until we need the money for developing water supply infrastructure.

Naperville City Councilman Dick Furstenau was quoted, "We need to make sure that we keep that commission as fiscally responsible as they possibly can be." Indeed! Not only by returning the surplus to the taxpayers, but by not taking it in the first place when it is not needed.