Water director: FY27 budget ‘unsustainable’ without big rate increases to fund repairs

Neeraj Patel, director of St. Louis City Public Utilities, told the Budget and Public Employees Committee that the water division’s FY27 budget is balanced on paper but “unsustainable” in practice because the division cannot draw on a now‑exhausted contingency fund.

Patel opened the presentation by listing system scale and operations: two treatment plants (Chain of Rocks and Howard Bend), roughly 129,000,000 gallons per day of treatment capacity, more than 90,000 active service connections and about 1,300 miles of water mains. He said the division performs roughly 27,000 state‑certified tests annually and monitors for more than 150 potential contaminants.

Why it matters: Patel said operating expenses and revenues are both about $84.2 million for FY27 but the division has no reserve to cover the normal fluctuations and emergency repairs that historically required transfers. “For over seven years we’ve been operating in a deficit,” he said, and the contingent fund that once approached $35–40 million is now…