Why Yellow Springs water rates are so high, and other communities could soon follow

But Yellow Springs village leaders say the rate study doesn’t paint the whole picture — and allege that similar hikes for other communities may be on the horizon.

Yellow Springs’ water rates are high due to multiple factors. One of the biggest, village administrators say, is that the current hikes are playing catch-up in a 40-year-long saga of deferred maintenance and replacing an obsolete water plant.

The village borrowed money to build a new water treatment plant, finished in 2018, for about $7 million. The plant was meant among other things to reduce the occurrence of brown water coming out of taps, caused by manganese and iron, said Brad Ault, water superintendent for Yellow Springs.

“It was so run down from lack of maintenance, and it was falling apart,” Ault said. “With the new plant, the manganese and the brown water, it disappeared almost overnight.”

Municipalities with new water treatment facilities and large infrastructure upgrades tend to have higher costs and rates, due to debt repayment, Piqua Utilities Director Kevin Krejny previously told this news outlet.

Such is the case with Yellow Springs. The village took out about $7 million in loans for infrastructure upgrades. The final payment year for the largest of these is in 2047. More than 30% of the water department’s budget goes towards loan payments, Burns said, which amounts to about $440,000 annually, spread out amongst fewer than 2,000 ratepayers.

That money has also been used for other water system upgrades, including leak detection technology that has dramatically reduced water lost in its system. Major leaks contributed to Yellow Springs losing over half of the water that went through their system in 2020, with a single discovered leak accounting for 800,000 gallons per month, administrators said.

“If you think about it, I think we’re at 100 million is what we’re producing,” Burns said. “So about 50 water towers is what we were losing a year. And that’s huge because you still have to produce that water.”

The village has reduced its water loss to as low as 17%, with the goal to get it below 10%, administrators said.

The previous plant, built in 1964, did not remove manganese and was well past its useful life, said Village Administrator Johnny Burns.

“We went from 2017 being on an (EPA) watchlist to building a new plant and ... having high quality water,” Burns said. “The better quality water has made it to where the mains are not giving us as many problems interrupting in the wintertime.”

However, updates to the village’s water system are still necessary, Burns said. Some water mains in the village’s system date back to 1928. Additionally, about two remaining miles of pipe are galvanized steel. The U.S. EPA includes galvanized pipes in its definition of “lead service lines” because they can trap particles — including lead — as they age and wear down.

Regulations drive up costs

Further environmental requirements such as dealing with PFAS — per-and polyfluoroalkyl substances, also known as “forever chemicals” — may mean not only further increased costs for Yellow Springs, but for municipalities across the region, Burns said.

“The other thing is, the EPA is changing rules faster than we can get caught up,” he said. “Yes, our rates are that high. But you’re going to see all these other ones (increase) in the next few years.”

The Yellow Springs plant uses pellet softening to filter and soften the water, a technology more commonly used in Europe. However, it is not equipped with filtration that would be needed to remove PFAS.

The Ohio EPA is currently studying Yellow Springs and other small communities’ water systems to determine how they could best address PFAS removal, but these mandates may come at a steep price tag, Burns said.

“To give you a perspective on PFAS, on a million gallons of water, you’re allowed four drops of water,” Burns said. “Four drops. We have seven. So we have to spend thousands, if not millions of dollars to try to figure out how to get rid of ... three drops of water in a million gallons.”

The village council in 2023 voted for a rapidly increasing rate schedule after hiring a consultant that “concluded that the Village’s existing water rates do not properly reflect the Village’s cost of providing this service,” according to an ordinance passed in February 2023.

The ordinance says prices will increase again in January 2026 and January 2027.

Yellow Springs has had the most expensive water in the region since 2017. The 2022 Piqua water study put the average quarterly combined water and sewer bill before the 2023 increase at $585. In 2025, the study estimated the combined quarterly water and sewer bill at $710.

A recent Dayton Daily News analysis found that this rate is much higher than any other community in the region. The village of Minster, similar in size to Yellow Springs, had a combined bill of $159.