Editor, The News:
Re: Judge for yourself, but Surrey has water metering (Letters, Jan. 12).
Water is a basic necessity and should not be used as a tool for extortion, just as hydro and natural gas rates are. These are not luxuries, and for people on limited income, these ever-increasing ideas of squeezing more and more money out of us is unconscionable.
Now, we see Anne Rostvig telling us education is rather futile because, “It is not infallible,” and, “ We are too lazy and too uncaring to comply.”
Nothing is infallible.
I think Ms. Rostvig is selling us short. This is exactly how ‘Big Brother’ seems to think also. Furthermore, she has the same philosophy that people only learn when we hit them in the pocket book.
This is the very same logic as ICBC, B.C. Hydro, Terasen Gas.
I went to the suggested website Ms. Rostvig provided, only to learn that water metering is nothing more than a lame attempt to justify yet another bloated bureaucracy, paid for by the ever-gouged taxpayer.
I still say we here in Metro Vancouver are blessed with an abundance of clean, watershed-protected rain water, which constantly falls from the sky at no cost to any of us.
Yes, it costs money to capture, process and distribute that rain-water, but having worked on those very water infrastructure systems since 1974, I can attest to all that the huge costs of building and running our drinking water system is not so much in the infrastructure, but the actual bureaucracy that has been built up around that system.
If you want to see some real interesting facts about this, check out the Metro Vancouver Financial Act Filings and you will see where a vast majority of our taxes and water rates are going.
Mike Boileau
Maple Ridge