The Oregonian reported yesterday that the Portland City Council is going slowly on the question whether to install an expensive water filtration plant out on Powell Butte. Apparently the Council's going to postpone that decision until after it decides whether to cede control of the city's water supply to a suburb-dominated regional board.

All this talk about putting the water supply in play makes me very nervous. My neighbor, Commissioner Jim Francesconi, apparently believes that if we don't sell the system to the suburbs, we won't be able to afford filtration and will have to go with some cheaper treatment technique. (It seems federal law requires that something be done to improve the current system.) I wonder why that's true. Can't the filtration costs just be financed, and added to everyone's water bill, including all the folks out in the 'burbs who drink Portland's Bull Run water? He seems to be suggesting that only water users in Portland would pay for a new system, or would pay for it disproportionately. Why is that? If I owned a precious commodity and could sell it on an open market, I would charge outsiders more than I would charge my family members. Couldn't Portland in fact make the suburbs pay more of the cost, rather than less? Or at least pay for it by the same number of cents per gallon? How "regionalization" would make filtration cheaper is beyond my current ability to reason. In the end, the water users of the region should, and will, pay, and the city's selling Bull Run isn't going to change that.

Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this story, however, was its explanation of why water rates are about to jump 10.6 to 14.4 percent, not even taking the needed capital improvements into account. According to The O --

Water rate forecasts already call for increases in July of 10.6 percent to 14.4 percent to deal with the bureau's troubled billing system and lower water use.

I'll keep this in mind next summer when I decide how careful to be with water around the house and garden. Let's see, the less we use, the more we pay per gallon. In the end, will I wind up paying pretty much the same regardless of what I use? Why conserve?

Finally, one of my council favorites, Erik Sten, weighs in with this: "It would be penny-wise and pound-foolish to leave the system as is. If we do the cheaper option, we're going to have less customers 20 years from now."

As they used to say on Seinfeld, Not that there's anything wrong with that.