No decision’s been made, but there’s a possibility Port Arthur water and sewer bills may soon go up.

The Port Arthur City Council held its regular meeting Tuesday. Hani Tohme, acting director of utilities, gave a presentation regarding utility rates and the news was not encouraging.

Basically, the water utilities department is in the hole financially and plans to dig out. A workshop is planned to discuss the matter at 3 p.m. March 27 before the regular City Council meeting along with a notice published in The Port Arthur News.

“We need to generate enough revenue to do projects on our own,” he said.

Tohme added that inadequate water and sewer service would be devastating to the city.

Mayor Derrick Freeman said he spoke with some of the city’s industrial partners who said they would chip in some money to help.

Raymond Scott Jr., District 1 City Councilman, said water utilities have been overlooked for a long time.

Tohme agreed and said the city has to address these problems. Additionally, some of the water meters haven’t been reading properly. For instance, the meter at the Park Central Holiday Inn on Jimmy Johnson Boulevard has read zero since January and the hotel hasn’t been billed.

Charlotte Moses, Position 7 councilwoman, said she hates that this City Council has to make these decisions about the water rates.

“A bad decision was made in 2011 to take the sewer rates away,” she said. “Nobody wants to raise rates in this time of their lives, but I don’t see another choice.”

Tohme said there’s no worse time to do this than following Hurricane and Tropical Storm Harvey, but if the problem is not taken care of now it will grow larger by next year.

Harold Doucet Sr., District 4 councilman, asked Tohme how he came up with a $1,655,298 deficit when the budget is supposed to be balanced.

He responded he wouldn’t submit a budget that’s not balanced, but there was “a huge mistake” concerning the Cheniere project’s revenue. Original estimates were the LNG plant would pay the city $6 million for water service. Instead, they are paying $3 million.

Doucet said he’s not in favor of Option 1 and raising rates in one year “on the back of the citizens.”

“We should choose the option for fixing the problems and moving forward. We shouldn’t go from deficit to surplus in one year. We should choose Option 2 or 3, even if it takes until the end of Fiscal Year 2019,” he said. “This didn’t happen overnight. This is not something the citizens did, but it’s what we failed to do. We need to look hard at operating costs.”

In other City Council business, the City Council approved waivers up to 18 months to allow manufactured homes, mobile housing units and recreational vehicles in floodplains, special flood hazard areas and to temporarily locate them in any zoning district for temporary use.

A memo from Ron Burton, director of development services, to Harvey Robinson, interim city manager, said the city of Port Arthur received a request from FEMA identifying the city as a potential recipient of temporary housing units on Oct. 24, 2017 while homes were being repaired.

Residents receiving manufactured housing units, mobile homes and RVs that do not comply with the city’s requirements must remove the non-compliant structures from the areas where the structures are not permitted by the zoning ordinance after the 18-month period.