A months-long effort to remove from office more than half of Westminster’s City Council over rapidly escalating residential water bills continues to inch forward despite the city twice rejecting the recall attempt as insufficient.
Recall proponents have hired former Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler to challenge Westminster’s determination that not enough valid signatures were collected to hold a recall election aimed at four City Council members, including Mayor Herb Atchison.
This week, Gessler filed a formal complaint in Adams County District Court against the city in an effort to force a special election on the calendar. He claimed the city clerk employed a “hyper-technical” methodology to reject petition signatures that was based on clerical errors by signature gatherers rather than fraud or malfeasance.
“What we’re looking at here is the right of people to place things on the ballot,” Gessler told The Denver Post.
No date for a hearing on the complaint has been set.
“We were seeing people were angry,” said 20-year resident Debbie Teter, describing the distress she said she witnessed among neighbors as they opened water bills this summer that were in some cases hundreds of dollars higher than normal.
Teter and others from the Westminster Water Warriors group say four of seven council members — Atchison, Anita Seitz, Kathryn Skulley and Jon Voelz — are being targeted because they have been unwilling to provide residents relief by rolling back rates.
Westminster’s monthly water rates went up between 11% and 47% from 2018 to 2019, with the heaviest water users getting hit the hardest. Another 11% bump in monthly cost went into effect in 2020, according to city data.
The increase wasn’t as noticeable in 2019, Teter said, because it was a wetter year and less watering was needed on people’s lawns and gardens. But last year ranked as Colorado’s eighth driest year in a century and a half of record-keeping.
Teter said her July water bill jumped from $300 in 2019 to $500 last summer.
“We’re not being listened to,” she said. “Discounted, not responded to, it goes deep — it’s local politics and local politics goes deep.”
Seitz, who has been on the council for seven years and was just re-elected in 2019, said Westminster had to raise water rates in 2018 to pay for needed fixes and overhauls of the city’s aging water and sewer system, including tanks, pipes and pumping stations that have exceeded their working life.
That same year, the city put a year-long moratorium on new development while it revamped an overtaxed and outdated sewage collection network. The decision to boost homeowners’ bills, Seitz said, came after months of study and public discussion.
“I do not want to diminish the actual impact or the anxiety of higher bills, made worse by a pandemic combined with a drought,” she said. “But knowing the condition the utility is in, I can’t defer that duty on to someone else. I’m proud we made the hard and right decision to invest in our infrastructure to protect human health and safety.”
“More than my mortgage”
Westminster’s recall dispute comes on the heels of several other recalls, or attempted recalls, of public officials in Colorado, as disagreements over local issues fester in what has become an increasingly vicious political climate nationally.
Complaints of high water rates cost Brighton Mayor Ken Kreutzer his job in a recall election in November 2019. Estes Park Trustee Cody Walker was ousted earlier that year over his proposal to build a mountain roller coaster on the edge of town.
An attempt last year to unseat the mayor of Idaho Springs over development plans in town failed at the ballot box while an effort last summer to recall four council members in Arvada over the city’s adoption of a single-hauler trash program failed to make it to the ballot.
Development disputes did, however, prematurely end the terms of two town trustees in Elizabeth at the end of 2019.
“I would say the political climate, especially nationally, may have an impact on people’s desire to attempt to recall than to wait for the next election,” said Colorado Municipal League Executive Director Kevin Bommer. “But recalls are still exceptionally rare.”
Sandy Pospisil, another long-time resident of Westminster, said her decision to help spearhead the recall effort in her city had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with what she pulled out of an envelope in August — a water bill totaling $1,113.
“It was more than my mortgage,” said Pospisil, who lives in the northern stretches of the city. “I never for the life of me thought that my water bill would be more than my mortgage.”
She admits she uses a lot of water on the landscaping around her home but said paying 70% more on a monthly basis between August 2017 and August 2020 — for the same amount of water — made no sense. Pospisil reached out to neighbors and found out they too were outraged by the rate spike.
“I realized it was not just me,” she said. “Their bills might only be up by $50 but it was everything to them. These stories took a piece of your heart and showed how out of touch our city councilors are.”
What’s worse, she said, is that her property borders Broomfield, where a flat rate of $3.26 per 1,000 gallons is levied on residents, no matter how much water they use. Pospisil’s water use above 20,000 gallons monthly is charged at Westminster’s third-tier rate of $12.88 per 1,000 gallons.
Recall backers say that Westminster far outstrips its neighbors in monthly water charges. Based on 39,000 gallons of water a month, Westminster charges a homeowner more than $430 a month while Arvada charges less than $220 a month and Broomfield charges less than $150 a month.
Heaviest users pay the most
But that higher price tag is due to the city’s decision to include a “conservation price signal” for those at the heavier end of water use. In other words, said Westminster Director of Public Works and Utilities Max Kirschbaum, those who use more water pay disproportionately more for it.
“The more water you use, the more the cost of water goes up,” he said. “Our cost to the low water user is at or below the average of the cities we compare to.”
In fact, Kirschbaum said, when the rates went up in 2018, the city decided to raise the threshold for its lowest rate — $3.96 per 1,000 gallons — from 4,000 gallons to 6,000 gallons a month. That, he said, kept some low-use households out of the city’s middle-tier rate of $8.15 per 1,000 gallons that applies to those using 6,000 to 20,000 gallons of water a month.
For a middle-tier water user in Westminster, who represents 80% of the city’s water customers, Kirschbaum acknowledged the city ranks at the higher end of cost — below Erie, Parker and Castle Rock but well above Denver, Thornton and Superior.
But he said the city has $60 million worth of maintenance and improvements it needs to make to its water infrastructure every year. Right now, Kirschbaum said, it can only do about half of that.
“Instead, what we’re focusing on is incremental improvements,” he said.
There are the 3 million-gallon water tanks near City Hall, built in 1968, that need to be replaced at $8 million apiece. And there’s the $15 million rehabilitation of the High Service Pump Station, which is responsible for moving four of every five gallons of water to city residents.
“We’re just trying to take care of what we own,” Kirschbaum said.
Seitz, one of the targeted council members, said the city is trying to help residents out with water bill credits of $100 a month for those who have lost income due to the coronavirus pandemic. And the city offers programs to homeowners to reduce water consumption, like Garden in a Box or turf conversion initiatives that replace thirsty bluegrass lawns with drought-tolerant, native seed mix landscaping.
“We’re not saying you can’t have an acre of Kentucky bluegrass but you have to pay for the impacts of that on our system,” Seitz said.
“Watch my pennies”
Kathleen Stiebler, a 40-year resident of Westminster, said the water rate hit isn’t just to the heavy users. A cancer survivor who has been out of work for two years, she said the $40 monthly increase she saw this past summer compared to the previous summer was excessive.
“My backyard died, my front yard died and my garden died,” she said, following her decision to cut back her outdoor watering this summer. “I’m in a position where I have to watch my pennies.”
She said she could accept a $5 per month increase on her bill to cover the city’s maintenance costs but not a doubling of her monthly charge.
Teter, with Westminster Water Warriors, said the more than 6,000 residents who signed the recall petitions over the summer are a loud, unified voice against what the city is doing. And those signatures were all the more difficult to procure given the pandemic’s restriction on movement.
The signature gatherers skipped door-to-door canvassing and instead set up tables in parking lots and on sidewalks and hoped that people would respond, Teter said.
“We didn’t push this on people — people came to us,” she said. “It gives people a sense of power — like they count.”
