Ratepayers in Rhineland will soon have one utility rate applied across the municipality.

The Public Utilities Board has approved Rhineland's request to merge utilities in Plum Coulee and Gretna and the rural area into one unit.

Reeve Don Wiebe says the first change that ratepayers will see is a utility rate adjustment in July. "That's a P-U-B order and a bit of a first step and then all of the rates will be equalized in January. We're very happy with this and it's going to make administration very happy, it makes all of the accounting so much simpler, the water testing will be under one authority, it's so much simpler to do it this way."

The move is being made several years after municipal amalgamation took place in 2015. Currently, Gretna, Plum Coulee, and the rest of the municipality are paying different rates. "Working together as a single utility will make projects like the pump station in Plum Coulee a lot easier to do because it's just one utility building, a pump station, that serves Plum Coulee and the rural part of the municipality there," said Wiebe.

The utility merger goes into effect on January 1st, 2021.