Rate Increase Pushback and the Importance of Proper Communication of Budget Challenges

Public Pressure Against Rate Increases

The city of Portage, a mid-sized community of approximately 40,000 people in Northwest Indiana, faced a challenge in late 2024 familiar to many in local government: they requested, and eventually passed, a four-phase sewer rate increase through 2027. Tracie Marshall, Portage’s Sanitary Superintendent, notes that sewer rates in Portage have historically fallen short of what’s needed to support critical infrastructure investments. However, the effects of aging pipes, failing lift stations, and stormwater intrusion are putting the utility under increasing pressure.

“We knew that our rates have historically been one of the lowest in the state. Still, there’s such a thing as too low... We have upgrades that are urgently needed to avoid overrunning our treatment plant and sewage backing up into our residents’ basements.”

Tracie Marshall
Wastewater Plant Superintendent

Still, residents and some city council members voiced concern over the rate hike, citing the strain it places on low- and fixed-income households. This is an all-too-familiar obstacle for utilities: despite acknowledging that repairs are necessary, the public is generally resistant to rate hikes to address their issues.

Communicating Infrastructure Challenges with APX

To improve the communication of infrastructure challenges to the board and public, Portage partnered with APX10 to deliver its decision intelligence platform for their sewer pipeline infrastructure. APX10 provides dynamic overviews and pipeline reinvestment guidance for Portage as they continue to address the backlog of capital projects and ongoing operational issues.

Using Portage’s existing data, the APX^® platform’s proprietary analytics and innovative AI empowers their teams by delivering an accurate overview of the most critical areas in their collection system. Portage now has standardized processes for determining criticality for every pipe in their network. More importantly, they can easily adjust how they are defining crucial factors that determine overall criticality, such as pipeline Condition Assessment and Consequence of Failure. This allows them to create unique decision-making paradigms for any area of their network. The dynamic nature of the platform allows for near real-time overview of assets and a system that pulls in their data automatically in the background.

Portage is leveraging the insights provided by the APX^® platform to improve daily operations and to prioritize sewer inspection, relining, and replacement. Furthermore, the solution provides short- and long-term projections of the budgets needed to keep up with reinvestment need and instantly shows the financial consequences of doing nothing.

“The insights that APX provides are something that we wish we had when we initially requested the rate increase. The criticality scoring system and budget impact dashboard is exactly what are looking for as we continue to work on improving our infrastructure quality.”

Tracie Marshall
Wastewater Plant Superintendent

Smarter Decisions and Leading Innovation

While Portage’s Wastewater Utility will fortunately see increased revenues through 2027, the pushback in passing a rate hike underscores the importance of effectively communicating infrastructure challenges and the cost to address them based on a practical, validated foundation. By linking existing data systems and analyzing information on a unified platform, Portage can make informed, proactive decisions in their sewer network. Ultimately, they can use the APX^® platform to communicate the realities and progress of running a complex utility to the board and public in a way that’s visual, understandable, and data driven.