Supply and Demand

Last week, in our Residence section, The Express News Group continued a decade-long summer tradition, identifying the “water hogs” on the South Fork over the past 12 months — the individual properties that draw the most treated water from the Suffolk County Water Authority’s system. The numbers were stunning, as always, with the top user, in Southampton Village, using 12.5 million gallons, about 100 times the average residential user’s rate. The top users were all comfortably in the seven- and eight-figure range.

The SCWA is considering a “superuser” rate — and that’s an idea that’s long overdue. The mere fact that so many gallons of treated water are going straight onto lawns and gardens as irrigation, systemwide, is a point of concern, since that water is being pulled from an underground aquifer that has limits. But if the average consumer uses the garden hose a bit too much, the superuser uses a fire hose.

Water is cheap, and it’s unlikely that a homeowner who can afford a water bill for 12.5 million gallons a year is going to blink at a few extra dollars per gallon for heavy use. But the SCWA can certainly use the added revenue to try to offset the costs shared by others on the system who are doing their best to conserve and use water responsibly.

This is nothing more than supply and demand. The authority, which has instituted a tiered system for billing, needs to add several more tiers that begin to truly extract the cost of demanding, and wasting, so much of a precious supply.