Magnolia Water · An out-of-state company · 33 Louisiana parishes
$116.42
A month, before a single drop comes out of the tap. That is about three times the state average, and the highest of any utility in the Public Service Commission’s own statewide rate comparison.
Magnolia Water charges the highest water bills the state regulates.
Chris Justin · licensed professional engineer · former consultant to this Commission
How your bill climbed, one order at a time
If you are a Magnolia customer, you already know this number. If you are not, you are one acquisition away from it. Every step on this chart is a decision by the Public Service Commission — watch what a household owes for using zero water, not a single drop, climb with each one.
Tier II zero-usage minimum · Slidell and St. Tammany, about 85% of Magnolia customers · milestones, not to scale
Before Magnolia took over, a typical bill for an empty house, zero water used, ran about $40 a month. (Customer-reported. Each system Magnolia bought had its own legacy rate; there was no single tariff.)
Magnolia's first rate case. The bill you pay before using a single drop jumps to $87.35. It was an uncontested settlement — not a single customer in the room.
Then it just ratchets. No hearing, no fight, no customer in the room — an automatic formula runs once a year and the number goes up. The water you actually use never changed. The fixed charge did, and that is the part of the bill you cannot lower by conserving.
Today. $116.42 a month for zero water. Not a single drop. The highest water and sewer minimums of any utility the Public Service Commission regulates.
Before Magnolia took over, that same bill ran about $40 a month. It is $116.42 now — about $76 more every month, more than $900 a year, on a house using zero water.
Tier II zero-usage minimum: the Slidell and St. Tammany subdivisions (Eden Isles, Meadows, Belair, Greenleaves), about 85 percent of Magnolia's customers and the highest of its three tiers. The 2021 and 2025 figures are the as-approved tariff; the 2023 and 2024 figures are computed from the LPSC Staff Report's own stated percentage changes; the pre-Magnolia figure is customer-reported. A separate $8 million pandemic surcharge, about $0.80 a month on sewer bills, is layered on top and is not included in these figures. Milestones, not to scale.
The service those bills are buying
Highest bills in the state. This is the service.
Magnolia's whole case for these rates is that it rescues broken systems. Its own president told this Commission, under oath, that before Magnolia took over, sewage was running into creeks and ditches, and that the company spent millions to fix it.
On July 2, 2026, the Louisiana Department of Health cited this system for six violations, following a May 27 site visit and photographic evidence of raw sewage overflowing a manhole here during a rain event on June 18. Missing shutoff valves, missing emergency-pump risers, missing backup pumps — across those six violations, 37 distinct lift stations were cited. A systemic maintenance gap, not one bad day, on a system where Magnolia claims $4.55 million invested.
And it is not one family complaining. Twenty-six parties intervened in the rate case, Docket U-37584 — the first time in Magnolia’s history that anyone ever had — and 24 of them were customers in these same neighborhoods. On August 7, 2025, the St. Tammany Parish Council voted 10 to 3 to formally ask state legislators, the Department of Health, and the Public Service Commission to act.
There is always a next filing.
I will tell you before the next one, in plain language, while there is still time to say something. That is what the list is for.
Keep me postedAcross Louisiana, not just here
Our regulators keep pointing fingers. Magnolia's customers pay the price.
Call the Public Service Commission about your water and you will be sent somewhere else. Its staff confirmed the rule on the record: water quality belongs to the Department of Health, sewage belongs to the Department of Environmental Quality. So the agency that sets your rate points at the agencies that police your service. Here is what happens when you follow that finger.
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The state inspects, and cites nothing.
“No violations are being cited at this time due to the facility subject to the Modified Administrative Order on Consent.”
From the Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality’s own inspection report for the Plantation Trace sewage plant in Thibodaux. On the same report, the inspector scored the plant a 1 out of 5 — the form's own word for a 1 is “very unreliable.” He counted everything and cited nothing, because a federal court order already covers the place. This is a different plant in a different parish from the photographs above. That is the point: this is not one bad subdivision.
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The federal order has penalties nobody collects.
Magnolia's own signed reports for that plant show 130 permit violations between November 2022 and February 2026 — fecal coliform reported at one point at 9,200 against a limit of 400. A federal court order sets automatic penalties for permit violations: $500 for each daily limit missed, $1,500 for a bad monthly average, at each plant.
Two different clocks, and they matter. The violation record runs four years. Those penalties only switched on at the end of 2025. So the question is not what the whole record adds up to. It is what has been collected since. EPA's own facility report for that plant shows the answer: zero formal enforcement actions, and zero dollars in penalties, over the last five years. A penalty on paper only becomes real when a regulator sends the demand letter.
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The Commission wrote a rule for itself, and never read the answers.
When the Public Service Commission let Magnolia take these systems over, it attached a condition of its own — Condition 12 — requiring Magnolia to report every six months on whether it was complying with that federal court order. Magnolia filed eight of those reports. Not one of them mentions the order. It filed unrelated state paperwork instead, and Commission staff accepted every one, for three and a half years.
The Commission sends you to the state. The state defers to the federal order. The federal order sits uncollected. And the Commission that wrote itself a rule to check on all of it never opened the envelopes. Three agencies, each pointing at another one — while Magnolia’s customers keep paying the highest water and sewer minimums the Commission regulates, for some of the worst service.
June 17, 2026
And then the Commission made it official.
The Public Service Commission approved three more years of Magnolia's automatic rate increases, after looking at only half the company. It reviewed the Louisiana subsidiary's books. It never opened the Missouri parent, CSWR, to see how much of your $116 flows back to it as profit. These filings run hundreds of pages, written dense on purpose. Here is what was sitting on the record that morning.
- They cannot verify the $422 million. Magnolia's whole case rests on having invested $422 million in Louisiana. Asked under oath whether she could verify that number, the Commission's own audit director — who confirmed she is not an engineer — testified: “No. I can't verify that.” The rate base she actually ran through the formula was about half of it. Hearing testimony, February 9, 2026
- A guaranteed 9.5% return, rolled forward without a real review. The formula hands Magnolia a 9.5% guaranteed return on its investment, year after year. Extending it lets that return roll forward automatically, instead of forcing the company to open its books in a full rate case and prove the number is still fair. LPSC Order U-35822
- The $8 million pandemic add-on. Last year the Commission turned $8 million of unpaid pandemic-era bills into a charge on sewer customers for the next ten years. It was not even the staff's recommendation. The vote was 3 to 2. LPSC Docket U-37570, August 20, 2025
- The parent company's books stay closed. Magnolia is owned by CSWR, a for-profit company in Missouri. The parent allocates its own overhead and affiliate costs down to Magnolia, and those charges get built into the rate you pay — so whether Missouri is charging Louisiana a fair price is the single biggest open question about your bill. Customers asked the Commission to examine exactly those books. They were turned down. The only financial audit in the record is a routine accounting opinion that the books add up, which is a different question entirely. ALJ recommendation, U-37584
The audit is not the win it sounds like.
The Commission did order an audit of Magnolia’s billing, customer service, and acquisition practices. Here is what it can actually do for your bill.
- It bars the public. The directive states there will be no intervention or participation from the public until after staff has concluded the audit. The customers who have lived this are shut out of it.
- It stops at the state line. Its scope is Magnolia's Louisiana operations. It does not reach the Missouri parent's finances — the one place the money question actually lives.
- It pauses nothing. Not one of the approved increases stops while the audit runs, and Louisiana law allows no refund of what you have already paid.
An audit of the Louisiana books was never going to fix a bill driven by the Missouri parent company. Telling those two things apart is the whole job.
The Commission’s staff never spoke with a single customer during the case, and testified that doing so was not necessary to their review. All morning, the only people who raised the parent company at all were customers standing at the public microphone.
I stood up that morning and told them not to.
I am Chris Justin, a licensed professional engineer and a former consultant to this Commission. I testified against the extension and asked them to send Magnolia to a full, open-book rate case instead.
“Don't rubber-stamp this self-dealing sleight of hand. Send it to a full rate case and make him show the riches he is hiding.”
They approved it anyway. And they will keep approving things like it, because an accounting opinion and an honest rate are two different questions, and nobody on that panel is equipped to tell them apart. We do not have an engineer on the Commission. From electric to gas to water, the same thing happens over and over: the utility writes hundreds of pages, and five people who cannot audit it vote yes.
That is the job I am running for. I am the engineer who understands the filing — who can read what the company actually submitted, find what it buried, and refuse to rubber-stamp the rate until the books are open.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Didn't the Commission order an audit? What can it actually do?
It bars the public from taking part, it stops at Magnolia's Louisiana books and never opens the Missouri parent company's profits, and it does not pause a single one of the approved increases.
The dollars show why it is not the win it sounds like. This same kind of review has run every year, and over the last three years it threw out up to $2.4 million Magnolia asked to charge — donations, gifts, out-of-period costs, things with no receipts. Spread across Magnolia's customers that is well under a dollar a month, and it is money you were never billed, because staff removes it before your rate is set. Even if this audit found four times as much, that is still under $4 a month, and Louisiana law allows no refund. The one thing that would actually change your bill, a full open-book rate case that could force the Missouri parent's books open, is exactly what the Commission voted not to require.
Why is my bill so high when I barely use any water?
Because almost none of your bill depends on how much water you use. Magnolia's usage rate has not changed in years. Every increase has been piled onto the fixed base charge, and the sewer charge is entirely fixed. You can conserve all you want and your bill barely moves. A Magnolia household can use zero water and still owe about $116 a month.
Why can't I just drill my own well?
For most Magnolia customers, you legally can't. State health rules require homes near an approved water main to connect to it, exclusive-territory rules keep any competitor from running a line, and many St. Tammany subdivisions were built to require central water. The deal is supposed to be simple: the company gets a monopoly, and in exchange you get safe, reliable, fairly priced service. Magnolia took the monopoly. Customers got the highest water bills in the state.
Is there anything left to do?
The rate vote is done, and Louisiana law does not let the Commission refund what you have already paid. But the fight is not over: Magnolia's parent-company books still have not been opened, the next filing is always coming, and the real fix is putting someone on the Commission who can read these filings and stop the next bad deal. Get on the email list above and I will keep you posted.
Can't this just be fixed by the next commissioner?
Not retroactively. Louisiana law does not let the Commission refund money you have already been charged. A future commissioner can change the formula going forward, and the real chance to force Magnolia's books open comes at the full rate case, around 2029. That is why who sits on the Commission matters.
Who regulates Magnolia, and who is behind this page?
The Louisiana Public Service Commission sets Magnolia’s rates, and because Magnolia’s systems span 33 parishes, all five commissioners vote on every Magnolia rate case. Slidell, the North Shore, and the Florida Parishes sit in Commissioner Skrmetta’s district; Magnolia’s other Louisiana systems fall across the other districts, including Commissioner Coussan’s. Water quality complaints go to the Department of Health and sewage complaints to the Department of Environmental Quality.
This page is by Chris Justin, a licensed professional engineer who consulted for the Public Service Commission and is a No Party candidate for that Commission. These filings are dense on purpose, so almost no one reads them. This page pulls out what matters in plain language.