Remember to apply for your stormwater discount

If you have your current City of Portland Water bill in hand, it takes less than five minutes to apply for a monthly discount on your residential and/or commercial stormwater disposal fee. You may qualify even if you’re like me, living in an area where the ground is tight clay and disconnecting downspouts draining rain from the roof isn’t a good idea. If you have at least four trees, at least 15′ tall, on your property rather than in the street right-of-way, you may qualify for a discount. I filled out the on-line form last month attesting to having at least four 15′ trees on our lot, and was told the estimated discount would be 8%. That’s 8% better than getting no discount.

Apply today, here.

On a related note, I was happy to be able to pay my Water/sewer bill on line using my credit card this latest time. It’s unfortunate there still isn’t the option of setting up automatic payments by electronic transfer from either a checking or credit card account. When I e-mailed to ask why, I received very prompt responses telling me that since the City has to abide by public records laws, if they kept credit/bank account information on file anyone could get access to it. Apparently when a customer pays by credit card over the phone, the staff person isn’t even allowed to write the number on a piece of paper, and after processing the charge there is allegedly no record of the account number kept by the City. Hmm. Seems like there should be some way to both protect citizens and make it easier for customers to pay repeating bills…. even if it takes passing legislation at the State level to specify that such information isn’t required to be released on demand as public records.