S.D. City Council to Strategize Water, Sewer Rate Increase Plan

By Alison St John / Reporter, KPBS Public Broadcasting

Published January 8, 2007 at 2:06 PM PST

This story was published more than 18 years ago.

This afternoon, San Diego City Council will adopt procedures to raise water and sewer rates in the city over the next four to five years. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

This afternoon, San Diego City Council will adopt procedures to raise water and sewer rates in the city over the next four to five years. KPBS reporter Alison St John has more.

News of raising water and sewer rates has been trickling out of City Hall for some time. Today the San Diego City Council gets down to the nitty gritty of giving residents and businesses notice that rate hikes are in the pipeline. Mayor Jerry Sanders has done his best to justify the increases.

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Sanders: Over the past five years we’ve had over 600 water main breaks and 633 sewer line breaks all of these breaks have had a tremendous impact on our community.

An investigation into how previous water and sewer rate hikes were spent revealed some of the money was siphoned off for other purposes. But Sanders has reimbursed the departments a million dollars and vows to be sure that wont happen again. The city must replace nearly 200 miles of cast iron pipe, some of it nearly 100 years old, to meet state and federal standards, and stop the breaks that now occur every few days throughout the city. Alison St John KPBS News.

Alison St John

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Alison St John currently serves as a general assignment reporter and occasionally co-hosts KPBS Midday Edition. She fell in love with KPBS Radio when she arrived in San Diego in 1985 and first heard NPR. She has been a voice on KPBS Radio since 1989, and has served as a news reporter for radio, TV and the web, as well as anchoring, hosting, producing and editing. Alison has reported on stories about North County and was based in the KPBS' North County Bureau. Alison covered the metro beat during the critical period of the San Diego City pension crisis, and the education beat while Alan Bersin was the controversial Superintendent of San Diego City School District. She covered health when the industry was converting to managed care and told welfare reform stories in the late 1990s when Clinton was “ending welfare as we know it.” She has covered land use issues extensively, looking at the challenges of meeting a growing population while preserving community character, and developing a better transportation system to meet environmental concerns. She has done many stories on the military in San Diego, and the series she edited on the challenges veterans face returning from active duty to civilian life won “Best of Show” from the San Diego Society of Professional Journalists. She occasionally hosts the KPBS Roundtable and KPBS Midday Edition. Alison has won awards from the San Diego Press Club, the Society of Professional Journalists, the Associated Press TV and Radio Association, and the California Golden Mike Awards. Alison was born in Tanzania, brought up in Scotland, and earned her degree in psychology and sociology from Durham University in England. Her postgraduate diploma is in student counseling. She worked in England, Nigeria, Switzerland, Belgium, India, and Japan before moving to the United States in 1981. She now lives in Oceanside and enjoys how her community is growing and changing.