Re: “Mayor seeks to lease part of park to Chesterfield for county drinking water,” June 1-3 edition:

Richmond Free Press staff writer Jeremy Lazarus deserves an award for his investigative reporting on the city’s plan to allow Chesterfield to build a water facility in a Richmond city park and charge Chesterfield a fifth of what Richmond customers must pay for a unit of water. 

This is a losing proposition for Richmond utility customers. Richmond’s Lewis G. Larus Park would suffer irreparable damage, with upward of a hundred huge trees to be removed in order to build a 2 million gallon storage tank facility exclusively for the use of Chesterfield County. 

Richmond utility customers would be on the hook for paying $1 million every five years to the city in lieu of federal income taxes on the sale of the additional 5 million gallons of water per day to Chesterfield County. 

The Niagara Bottling LLC, which consumes nearly a million gallons of water a day, recently chose Chesterfield County for a new bottling plant, citing the cheap availability of water.  

Perhaps Niagara chose the county over Richmond to locate their business because Richmond charges city customers five times the price for a unit of water than what it charges Chesterfield County. 

Ironically, Chesterfield now wants to build a water facility in a Richmond city park to meet this increased demand for cheap water that keeps Richmond businesses at a competitive disadvantage. This defies common sense.

It breaks my heart that Richmond, with a 40 percent poverty rate, continues to receive the short end of the stick from our city-owned utility. Is it unreasonable for Richmond utility customers to expect to reap some benefit from owning the utility? Is it unreasonable to expect that our utility will not damage a Richmond city park to provide cheap water to the county but instead will provide affordable water to Richmond customers? 

Let’s quit treating our Richmond-owned utility like the proverbial “cash cow” to be milked while our residents on Social Security struggle to pay one of the highest water bills in the state.

CHARLES POOL

Richmond