"When the well's dry, we know the worth of water."

Ben Franklin stuck that in Poor Richard's Almanac 250 years ago.  These days, with both the literal water well and metaphorical financial well drying up in San Diego, Mayor Jerry Sanders is letting us know the worth of water.  And guess what? It's apparently worth much more in your house than it is at your office.

The Center on Policy Initiatives has released a (pdf) study analyzing the mayor's new proposal to raise the cost of water in the city.  This proposal is currently flying through its council appointment and shows little signs of being held up, much less stopped.  This is, primarily, because nobody disputes the goal of the measure- raise water prices to fix an antiquated and dangerous sewer system.  As is so often the case though, the devil is in the details.

Mayor Sanders has proposed raising water rates across the board to all types of property.  However, when all is said and done in these adjustments, CPI's analysis reveals that residential customers will be paying 30% more for their water than business customers.  In the process, it would target its rate hikes specifically on residential customers:  11.75% hike for single-family homes, 18.5% hike for multi-family buildings (apartments, etc.), and just 2.42% for businesses and industry.

So on the one hand, it's just working families getting the shaft in a city that's been giving them the shaft forever.  The upper class won't miss a beat, industry is fine, but low and middle class families get hit hard.  Aside from the urge to just write it off as Sanders being a jerk (he is, but that's several other stories), why does this make sense for him and/or the city?

San Diego has spent the past decade throwing itself headlong into luxury development.  Expensive high rise condos downtown, McMansion developments stretching for miles, luxury hotels on the coast to match the snazzy new convention center...they all conspire to push low income residents further out and suck in businesses who smell green blood in the water.  Jerry Sanders was ushered into office largely on his promises to speed up this sort of development, and he's done a pretty good job of delivering on that promise.

But now the real estate bubble is deflating, new condos have gone from the upper 200s to the upper 100s in a matter of six months, and the tax boost from new money is tapering off.  You've got people locked into the houses and condos they've bought recently, and they're much less apt to pack up and leave town during a downswing than are businesses who have profited from the economic boom.  The more stable (or trapped if you're a pessimist) side of the water biz is the residential side.  San Diego in general, and Mayor Sanders in particular, are no slouches when it comes to doing backflips for business interests.  There are grand designs for the interior extension of 125 that imagine it becoming a major industrial and manufacturing center for the region, with corporate jets flying into the refurbished airport and buckets of new revenue to bail out the fiscal disaster that is the San Diego budget.

San Diego is more than happy to take advantage of its working class because of the presumption that it'll always be there one way or another.  The cynical reality that nobody in the government wants to admit to is that as long as there's a never-ending supply of Mexicans coming across the border legally, illegally, or as commuters, the working class of this city and county is always going to be taken for granted.  The new water rates are just one more reflection of the skewed priorities in San Diego's government.