Henrico County's Board of Supervisors passed its roughly $1.36 billion budget for the upcoming fiscal year on Tuesday.
And although county officials agreed to reduce property tax rates for residents and business, county water and sewer bills will rise starting July 1. (Virginia’s fiscal year runs July 1–June 30.)
Bentley Chan, director of public utilities, told VPM News that the agreed-upon rate increases are a proactive measure to reduce costs across the board.
“If we do nominal proactive increases year over year, it helps us to continue to fund the things that we rely on,” Chan said. “We do this so residents don't get a great shock with a sudden big rate increase. We're trying to help hedge against that.”
Historically, the county has implemented planned rate increases for water and sewer maintenance almost every year. The 5% increase itself will only affect residents’ bi-monthly billing by $7.35.
That slight change will increase the department’s projected revenue from around $142 million to just over $152 million. Typically, the increased revenue goes toward immediate needs and repairs.
For instance, in 2024 there were 374 water main breaks in the county and 207 year-to-date in 2025, according to county officials. Some of those breakages can be attributed to January’s regional water outage.
Chan said the revenue collected by the county will go toward the immediate priority of safeguarding access to clean and safe drinking water.
“While our current systems are resilient, we want to make sure we can act quickly, should something happen,” Chan said. “Those rate increases help us do that.”
To address the future water infrastructure needs, Henrico is working with engineers from Whitman, Requardt & Associates LLP to determine short-, medium- and long-term water access solutions.
In fiscal 2026, the county will spend $50 million to strengthen and expand Henrico’s existing water infrastructure for a more reliable and independent supply.
Although Henrico is contractually obligated to purchase at least 12 million gallons per day (MGD) from the City of Richmond through 2040, due to a 1994 city-county agreement, Chan said the county is already working to reduce its dependency on Richmond’s water supply.
“What came out of the Whitman report is how do we build more redundancy and resiliency in our system?” Chan told VPM News. “We do have that $50 million to start, and we hope that over the next five to seven years that will equal $350 million to fund the entirety of our needs.”
There’s growing support among Henrico officials to invest in new water transmission lines that would extend toward the eastern side of the county, where residents were most adversely affected during January's water crisis.
This proposed solution would include construction of an approximately 70,000-foot water transmission line over the course of five to seven years.
Although the county would have to endure the cost and length of construction, Three Chopt Supervisor Misty Roundtree said that equitable access to county resources is just as important as sustainable use.
“I know that there, we've had some hard conversations about making sure that our resources are dispatched equitably throughout the county,” Roundtree said during the April 8 board meeting. “As we are planning and figuring out where our infrastructure dollars go, that it is geared in large part towards equitable access to water throughout the county.”
As the county works internally to solve infrastructure needs, officials are also working across jurisdictions. Varina Supervisor Tyrone Nelson said the county continually meets with Richmond, Hanover and Chesterfield officials to determine what that solution should be.
Nelson added he hopes residents understand that these conversations take time and may come at a cost.
“This rate change is something that we've been doing to try to keep up with our infrastructure cost, not because boards of supervisors have been failing the county. That's not it,” Nelson said. It's just the infrastructure that costs money.”
