PORT ANGELES — Rates for electricity, solid waste, transfer stations and Medic 1 will be going up next year, but electricity increases won’t occur until next summer.
The Port Angeles City Council approved the rate increases Tuesday but amended the increases to postpone the electricity increase to June 1, when city residents consume less. The rest of the increases will go into effect Jan. 1.
The decision followed a lengthy presentation of the 2026 utility rates led by city Finance Director Sarina Carrizosa.
The rates are all increasing using the city’s approved Cost of Service (COSA) methodologies. The rate increases were presented first to the Utility Advisory Committee, which unanimously approved the resolution brought before the city council.
“We are seeing a number of significant increases that will be occurring in our 2026 budget, mainly from high inflation,” Carrizosa said. “We’re seeing increases for personnel costs that resulted from collective bargaining for equipment and for capital needs.”
Service levels are being kept to 2025 needs so the finance department didn’t include additional increases in areas the city has control over the budget, she said.
“The city has been impacted by the inflationary increases that have occurred really nationwide,” Carrizosa said. “We are not immune to that, and so we’re seeing that within our budget. And so really we’re balancing our affordability with maintaining our infrastructure and capacity so that we can meet the critical needs of our infrastructure.”
Due to those increases, the city’s electric utility budget is expected to increase by $1.8 million, which is a 7.8 percent increase to the overall budget, she said.
There is a 2.6 percent increase in personnel costs and a 12 percent increase to the utility’s budget from the Bonneville Power Association’s rate increase of 4.78 percent.
Those increases, averaged with the base rate and the city’s consumption, come to a 13.5 percent increase for residential customers.
“This is largely the result of that large increase that we saw from BPA,” Carrizosa said. “Without that increase, the city increases for the rates would have been pretty modest. So the things that we can control that did increase, and some of the things that we are not able to control, things like fuel and equipment, we estimate that without BPA the rate increase would have been about 2.5 or 3 percent.”
For commercial and municipal rates, the increase ranges from 9.8 percent to 21.4 percent.
For residential customers, the base rate will increase from $34.41 in 2025 to $41.97 in 2026 and 2027, according to the agenda packet.
For the solid waste utility, the city is seeing an increase of about $1.6 million to the budget, Carrizosa said.
“That’s about 10 percent as compared to 2025,” she said. “So there have been a number of changes within the solid waste utility if we’re comparing the budget years. Most notably in this utility, we have about a 17.7 percent increase to our transfer costs.”
The solid waste utility has been impacted by several factors over the past few years, Carrizosa said.
“First were the impacts from China’s National Sword Policy that changed the recyclables that they were taking and eventually reduced that to where they were not taking recyclables, so that impacted our overall transport costs and the costs particularly for recycling,” she said. “It also created some structural changes within the recycling market nationwide. We are not the only ones feeling the impacts of that.”
Multiple years of inflation and supply chain delays as well as equipment and fuel increases also have impacted the utility.
To help keep the rates as affordable as possible, the department has proposed a decrease for debt payments of about 34.6 percent, she said.
Weekly residential solid waste collection rates are expected to increase 14.4 percent from $43.37 in 2024 and 2025 to $49.64 in 2026 and 2027, according to the agenda packet.
Transfer station rates have a planned increase of about 8.3 percent, Carrizosa said.
The Medic 1 utility budget is seeing an overall increase of $370,000, about a 9.4 percent increase, she said. Pharmaceuticals is seeing an increase of 105.8 percent, she added. Then there’s a 22 percent increase for dispatch services and a 277.8 percent increase for equipment.
All of that means an 18.5 percent increase for residential customers. That’s a yearly difference of $27.44 for residential customers, Carrizosa said.
“To keep those rates as low as possible, we are proposing a use of $80,000 for each year within our COSA cycles, so for each of the three years, we’re proposing using $80,000 of excess reserves for rate stabilization,” she said.
Medic 1 also is subsidized by the general fund, which provides $265,500 every year to support operations.
Carrizosa also provided a breakdown of estimates for high- , medium- and low-consumption residential customers when all of the rates are combined.
A high-consumption customer will see an increase of about $38.74 a month, while a medium-consumption household would see an increase of $32.08 and a low-consumption increase is expected to be $27.75 a month.
“So we recognize that it’s always difficult when we’re looking at rate adjustments, and so we just wanted to note that staff is very committed to ensuring our utility rates are affordable for our community,” Carrizosa said. “I think that’s reflected in our budget and our ability to hold the amounts in our budget as much as possible to those 2025 amounts.”
For customers who need assistance, the city offers a low-income discount program as well as budget billing and payment plans.
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Reporter Emily Hanson can be reached by email at emily.hanson@peninsuladailynews.com.
