Show-me Ratemaker

I am proud to have created the Show-me Ratemaker water and sewer rate analysis programs for the Missouri Department of Natural Resources. These programs turned out to be so useful that they have become the do-it-yourself rate analysis "tools of choice" of hundreds, perhaps thousands of the 70,000 municipal public water and sewer systems around the U.S. Rates developed using Show-me Ratemaker are accepted by many State Revolving Fund and other funding programs. In fact, the State of South Dakota has a Small Community Planning Grant, paid for with State Revolving Fund set-aside funds. This grant pays communities for getting rate studies done with Show-me Ratemaker.

The Missouri Department of Natural Resources was reorganized in early 2006 and no longer supports or distributes Show-me Ratemaker. To get both versions of Ratemaker plus many other useful documents and tools call the National Drinking Water Clearinghouse at 1-800-624-8301 and request Product Number DWCDMG57, the Environmental Management Suite CD.

But wait, I have a caution.

As many as 90 percent of the hundreds or thousands of rate studies performed with Show-me Ratemaker have errors in them. Some are very serious. That is not Ratemaker's fault. It's the operator. To put it bluntly, 'The jet is fast but it takes a good pilot to fly it to its destination.' The rate analyst needs to make many critical assumptions. The risks of making bad assumptions in the first two dozen analyses you do are high. I know, I've made more rate analysis mistakes than almost anyone else will get the chance to. I now have 129+ rate studies under my belt so you can best manage your risks and gain the greatest return on investment by engaging me or another broadly experienced analyst to do your first analysis for you. Then, once you have a benchmark to follow, perhaps you can use Show-me Ratemaker to do follow-up rate studies.