The young Honduran politician was in the middle of his first bid for reelection as mayor of Puerto Cortés, a city of 54,000 people on the country’s Caribbean coast, when his main rival adopted an unusual campaign tactic. According to people who lived in the town at the time, the candidate would show up at people’s homes and help them rip out newly installed water meters, which he would then throw into the nearby bay.

“My opponent built his entire campaign around the promise that he would stop charging people for their water service,” recalls Lara. “That’s all he talked about.”

The gambit was intended to inflame discontent over Lara’s decision to require the installation of water meters in every home, and it very nearly succeeded. “I won, but just barely,” says Lara. “The margin was 480 votes!”

Though extreme, the incident illustrates the passions that can be unleashed by a simple mechanical device that measures water consumption. It also reveals a quirk that makes water different from nearly all other public services. Consumers generally don’t mind paying for their actual use of electricity, gas, long distance telephone service or even cable TV. But when it comes to tap water, a different logic seems to apply. Possibly because they believe that access to water is a basic human right, or because they assume that it costs little or nothing to produce, people often dislike paying for it (bottled water is a different story).

Free for some. When Lara became mayor of Puerto Cortés in 1994, less than half of the city’s homes and businesses had water connections, and there were only 170 water meters in operation. People paid a flat water rate of 8 lempiras (slightly less than US$1.00 at the prevailing exchange rate) every two months, regardless of the level of actual consumption. Even at that rate, around 40 percent of all consumers simply refused to pay—and suffered no consequences.

This had two effects. First, consumers who did have running water tended to waste it. “People would leave their taps on all night,” recalls Oscar Moreno, president of the neighborhood association in the city’s Barrio San Isidro.

Second, the water service (which at the time was run by a national water and sanitation agency) was chronically underfunded, and consequently incapable of operating and maintaining the system, let alone making investments to improve quality and extend service to the 55 percent of the population that was still without water. Everyone else either got by with contaminated river water or paid exorbitant amounts for bottled water.

The situation came to a head following a hurricane that left the entire city without water for several months (See link at right, “Service worth the price”). Lara set out to rebuild the crumbling water and sanitation infrastructure and to improve a host of other public services. In a move to gain public support for these projects, Lara’s administration restored and expanded water service first, and only subsequently announced a series of progressive increases in the water rate.

Moreover, Lara and his staff spent many hours meeting with community groups to discuss the need for water conservation, the importance of financing service improvements with revenues, and the role of meters in helping people to keep track of consumption.

Elio Enriquez, a former president of a Puerto Cortés neighborhood who plans to run for mayor in the 2005 elections, credits Lara with turning public attitudes around. “He helped people to understand the importance of water meters as a way of tracking consumption and conserving our water,” says Enriquez. “Now almost everybody has a meter, and those who still don’t are asking for one. Not because they want to pay more for their water, but because they think they’ll save if they have one.”

Today, around 95 percent of Puerto Cortés’s population has access to running water, according to Aguas de Puerto Cortés, the service operator. Darío Urbina, the municipality’s chief engineer, says nearly all businesses and institutions and about 75 percent of all homes are equipped with water meters. To encourage people to request a meter, the city charges a flat rate of approximately US$4.20 per month to un-metered homes. Homes with meters pay around US$1.90 for the first 20,000 liters, and slightly more for additional consumption.

“We’re now focusing on extending water service to low-income neighborhoods where people are in the process of obtaining legal title to their homes,” says Urbina. “Almost all of them insist that we put in a meter even before we open the connection.”

Fair for everyone. Puerto Cortés shows that water meters can be a cost-effective and democratic way to promote water conservation and distribute the resource equitably. “Meters are a great way to reduce consumption, and to let each family decide how much they want to consume,” says Ian Walker, president of ESA Consultores in Tegucigalpa, and an expert on water services in Central America.

Speaking at a recent IDB conference on the challenge of financing the expansion of water service, Walker argued that studies consistently show that people tend to reduce their water consumption when they get a meter. In some cases this effect is striking. He cited a study in Panama that found that within three months of the installation of water meters, consumption dropped by an average of 20 percent per month.

In Puerto Cortés, average household consumption was 53,000 liters per month when the city began its meter installation program in 1996, according to Urbina. Today, the average has dropped to 35,000 liters per month.

Indeed, this may indicate that water in Puerto Cortés is too cheap. “In our region we give ourselves the luxury of consuming, on average, 30,000 liters per household per month,” Walker said at the conference, referring to a series of studies of consumption in Central American cities.

“Human health and hygiene, and even comfort, do not require consumption on that level. There are many cities in developed countries where consumption does not reach 20,000 liters per month.”

In this respect, water meters expose one of the great ironies of water consumption in Latin America: while tens of millions of people in the region are still without basic water and sanitation, those who have a working connection in their homes tend to use far more than necessary.

Excessive consumption is often due to a casual disregard for the impact of “internal leaks”—things like dripping taps, running toilets, and broken pipes inside a residential or business property. When Puerto Cortés’s only hospital was fitted with a meter, for example, it suddenly started getting water bills in excess of US$2,500 per month. Water company officials visited the hospital and helped the staff to find dozens of leaky toilets, pipes and taps. Once these were repaired, the hospital’s monthly bill dropped to an average of US$200 per month, according to officials at Aguas de Puerto Cortés.

These savings don’t just benefit the pocketbooks of individual organizations or families. They also make it easier for cities to extend service to areas that still lack water or have it only intermittently.

Instead of investing in costly new wells or water purification plants in order to increase supply, service providers can serve more customers with the same amount of water.

Puerto Cortés’s water system is still far from perfect. Several thousand families still lack water and sewage connections in their homes, and a planned sewage treatment system is still awaiting completion. But by creating social consensus around the idea that everyone should pay for what they consume, the city has laid the foundation for a water service that should be able to finance ongoing expansion and service improvements in the years ahead.

For Marlon Lara, evidence of this new consensus came in the form of yet another election—his third—in 2000. “I went up against the same candidate,” Lara recalled. “And once again, he said the same things [about not charging for water service]. But this time, I won by 5,000 votes!”

Questions? Comments? Suggestions? Please write to editor@iadb.org