The High Cost of Being a Resident of Modesto California
.By Emerson Drake 
The City Council keeps raising the cost of living here in Modesto by charging us more for the necessities. Check your water and electric bill and you’ll find a 6% city tax ($6.00 for every hundred dollars on your bill) just for the privilege of living here. And now they want to raise our sewer bills even more to add on to the sewage treatment plant. The funny thing is, if you can call it that, of the majority of the companies that use our sewage treatment facility, most of them DON’T pay that tax and one is even suing us for over billing.
For the few companies that do pay the city tax there is a cap or max limit on the tax they have to pay.
Everyone encourages us to conserve water, and we should, but now the city wants to raise our rates because they aren’t selling as much water and need a higher profit margin to cover their spending. Because they can’t control their spending WE have to pay more.
Residents are encouraged to conserve electricity but we pay more than large.companies, that chew through electricity at an ever increasing rate, 17 cents vs 10 cents per kWh, PLUS we pay the city utility tax and most of them don’t!
Now the City Council wants to give another set of one time incentive pay to MPD managers, totaling almost a quarter of a million dollars. Remember just a few short months ago we paid millions of dollars in one time bonuses to city employees. I guess we’re just lucky there are fewer of the MPD managers so our bill is less.
The really strange thing is there are actually people out there saying we should be happy paying extra to support big businesses, large corporations and the wealthy. Talk about a sense of entitlement.
Eye On Modesto 
The cost of things just keeps going up and up! It’s no wonder our local businesses have to keep raising prices just to keep up with the cost of necessities and doing business!