Richland Hills · issues
Civic issues
Topics getting the most attention in Richland Hills public meetings, ranked by how frequently they come up.
Utility rate increases from Fort Worth
Your water bill goes up a bit this year — about $2 a month for a typical 2,000-gallon customer, more for heavy users — because wholesale costs from Fort Worth and TRA rose. It's far less than the 2024 study projected, and the city is adopting a tool to model rates in real time.
Water and Wastewater Rate Ordinance Revision
Wholesale costs from Fort Worth (water up 10.68%, sewer up 18% on the pass-through) are forcing a rate update. A typical household would pay about $6.95 more per month, and the utility fund runs dry by 2029 if rates stay flat. The city is also carrying a $2.7 million annual gap in infrastructure replacement funding.
IT Infrastructure Replacement Package
The city's network gear is at or past end of life. The council chose to buy Fortinet equipment and Dell servers outright (about $596,000 total) instead of a seven-year Meter subscription that would have cost roughly $306,000 for the network alone, saving money and keeping the city from paying for monitoring twice.
Aging city IT network replacement
The city's 16 network switches — some dating to 2018 — are aging out of support, and replacing them piecemeal would cost roughly $99,000 up front. Staff propose a Meter "network as a utility" subscription at about $27,118 a year for five years, covering hardware, monitoring, firewalls and Wi-Fi with free upgrades. Council wants longer-term pricing and a cost comparison before signing anything.