Water bills to go up by 13%

(Editor’s note: The section about The Commons in Lincoln was updated on March 6.)

Households on town water will see another double-digit increase in fiscal 2027 to continue funding big-ticket projects including the Lincoln Road water main replacement and installation of new “smart meters” at residences.

Rates will go up by 13% in the budget being presented at Town Meeting on March 29, Water Department Superintendent Rick Nolli said at a Water Commission public hearing on March 3. Rates went up by 10% both this year and last year.

Lincoln residents who use 70,000 gallons of water per year (a benchmark slightly higher than the actual figure) are now paying $744 a year. With the increase, that would rise to $841 a year, Nolli said. This is less than that residents of Concord and Wayland pay, but more than Lexington and Sudbury. Compared to some other Massachusetts towns with populations close to that of Lincoln, the town will be paying less than Topsfield ($1,716 a year), Rowley, Mendon, Rockport, Dover, and Merrimac ($928 a year), he said.

The $2.82 million overall operating budget represents a 34% increase over the current year’s. The biggest increases are for debt service ($873,925 in FY27 vs. $398,400 in FY26) and $284,574 in a one-time accounts-receivable adjustment. The latter expense arose because the department discovered that The Commons in Lincoln was being charged 10 times that they should have been since they installed a new primary water meter in late 2019 or early 2020 and it was “incorrectly configured in our billing system,” Nolli said.

The total overcharge was more than $500,000; in addition to the refund, the matter is being corrected by not charging for more recent items such as the new connections for the new units now under construction, and not billing The Commons for their water use since the error was discovered.

The matter may have gone undiscovered for much longer if the Commons hadn’t noticed the sudden reduction in the first bill they got after the billing system was corrected and called the Water Departmwnt about it. 

“After that meter was installed, for some reason, the department’s billing system did not have the correct settings and The Commons continued to pay their bills without question, even though they were incorrect,” Nolli said. “When we started the new water meter replacement program in 2024, we wanted to take care of all the larger meters before getting into residence homes, and The Commons was one of the first ones we did. The first and second billing cycle after the 2024 replacement is when the questions [from The Commons] started coming in, wondering why the water bill was so much less than it had been, and that’s when we realized we had an issue.”

The Water Department is also seeking $457,350 for capital items including year three of the four-year smart meter replacement project, a generator for the Tower Road well, and repairs to several buildings. This is substantially less than the capital requests approved at Town Meeting in March 2025 ($6.79 million) and 2024 ($2.41 million) for the water main project, smart meters and other smaller capital expenses. Most of those expenses are being paid for by bond sales.