Topeka’s water rates are set locally. Neither the State of Kansas nor the federal government approves or sets them.

Who actually sets the rates

The Topeka City Council sets water (and wastewater and stormwater) rates by ordinance. The current schedule is in Topeka Municipal Code § 13.05.020. The last multi-year package was adopted in 2023 for 2024–2026; they are in another public rate process now for 2027 and beyond.

That is the normal arrangement for a city-owned utility in Kansas.

Kansas Corporation Commission (KCC)

The KCC does not regulate municipal water rates.

It regulates investor-owned (private) utilities — electric companies like Evergy, gas companies, and a handful of small private water systems (Suburban Water, Barton Hills, etc.). KCC’s own jurisdiction materials state that it does not regulate municipalities. Topeka’s water utility is city-owned, so it is outside KCC rate jurisdiction.

State of Kansas — limited statutory overlay, not rate-setting

Kansas statutes give cities the power to set their own rates and require those rates to be reasonable and sufficient to cover operations, maintenance, extensions, and debt service (see K.S.A. 12-860 and related first-class city provisions).

That is a floor and a reasonableness standard, not a state agency review before rates take effect. There is no Kansas Public Service Commission equivalent for city water.

If someone claimed the rates were unreasonable or unjust, they could theoretically ask a district court to review them. That is rare and is after-the-fact litigation, not routine state regulation.

KDHE regulates water quality (Safe Drinking Water Act implementation, permits, testing), not prices. The Kansas Water Office and Division of Water Resources deal with water rights and planning, not retail rates.

If Topeka borrows from the state Drinking Water Revolving Fund, loan documents can impose financial covenants (dedicated revenue, etc.). Those do not dictate the cents-per-thousand-gallon charge on a residential bill.

Federal government

None on rates. EPA rules cover quality, treatment, lead service lines, and reporting. There is no federal water-rate commission for municipal systems.

Practical takeaway

Topeka’s declining-block industrial discounts, higher outside-city rates, base charges by meter size, and the timing of increases are all local policy choices made by the Governing Body. They can be criticized, compared to peer cities, or challenged in court on reasonableness grounds, but they do not go through KCC or a federal rate case. 

Is this public record?

Frito-Lay (PepsiCo)
Plant at 1303 SW 41st Street. One of their larger U.S. snack plants (Lay’s, Fritos, Doritos, Cheetos, Tostitos). They have publicly talked about cutting water use ~52% per pound of product since 1999 through process changes and sanitation practices. They were among the customers who noticed and complained when Kansas River chloride spiked in 2018, which is a sign they use city water in production, not just for restrooms.

Mars Wrigley
Chocolate plant in Kanza Fire Commerce Park (Topeka Blvd / Innovation Parkway area). Opened around 2014, later expanded (Snickers, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, M&M’s lines). It was built as a LEED Gold facility with explicit water-efficiency targets: ~35% reduction in potable water use versus a baseline building, 71% reduction in water used for sewage, and no irrigation. Still a large process-water user.

Reser’s Fine Foods (“Reesers”)
Salad / refrigerated-foods plants and distribution, including the main salad plant at 3728 SE 6th Street. They have been in Topeka for decades, employ well over 1,000 people locally, and have been expanding warehouse/distribution space. Produce washing, cooking, and sanitation drive the water demand.

Other names that often show up in the same conversation: Hill’s Pet Nutrition (another large manufacturer) and, historically, Goodyear (they also reacted to the 2018 chloride issue). Hospitals and the state complex use a lot of water too, but the food plants are the standout industrial users.

Scale

The City of Topeka Water Treatment Plant averages about 21–22 million gallons per day (roughly 8 billion gallons a year). In public rate presentations this year, city staff used “one of our industrial users at 10 million gallons” as an example — that figure is monthly. A single customer at that level is using on the order of 300,000+ gallons a day. A handful of food plants can therefore account for a noticeable share of total industrial demand.

Topeka still uses a declining-block rate structure: industrial customers (and especially “Industrial II”) pay less per thousand gallons than residential customers. That is why the city talks about large industrial users separately when they discuss rate increases.

Yes. Municipal water-billing data is generally public under the Kansas Open Records Act. You can request:

• Usage by customer class (residential / commercial / industrial / Industrial II)
• Lists or rankings of the largest volume customers (they sometimes redact exact account names or give ranges)
• Historical industrial usage for planning or rate studies

The city already discusses “our industrial users” in open council and utility meetings, so the existence and approximate size of the big plants is not secret. Individual monthly bills for a named company are more likely to be treated as customer-specific and may be redacted or summarized.

If you want the actual ranking and gallon figures, the practical next step is a KORA request to the City of Topeka Utilities Department asking for the top water customers by volume for the most recent calendar year (or a multi-year average), broken out by customer class. They are used to those requests. 

How to reach Reser’s Fine Foods — if you want to write the president

Mark Reser does not publish a personal email on the company website. The address that counts is the mailroom in Beaverton.

Reser’s Fine Foods, Inc.
Attn: Mark Reser, Chief Executive Officer
PO Box 8
Beaverton, OR 97075

Street / visitor address:
15570 SW Jenkins Road
Beaverton, OR 97006

Main phone: 503-643-6431
Toll-free: 800-333-6431

Ask the operator for the Office of the CEO, or for Mark Reser’s assistant. That is how a letter gets opened.

Official contact form: resers.com/about-us/contact-us
Put “Attention: Mark Reser — Topeka water rates” in the subject and attach your letter.

Emails the company itself prints

• consumeraffairs@resers.com — public correspondence
• GivinginBeaverton@Resers.com — headquarters community desk
• GivinginTopeka@Resers.com — Topeka Cares team (local plant people read this)
• marijo@resers.com — Mari Jo Prlain, Corporate Director, philanthropy, 503-526-5716

Their published names usually run first-name-plus-last-initial @resers.com. That would make markr@resers.com a guess, not a listed CEO address. Do not treat it as confirmed. Send the paper letter anyway.

Topeka campus

3728 S.E. 6th Street, Topeka, KS 66607
3215 S.E. 6th Avenue, Topeka, KS 66607

Facilities contact in the 2025–26 hearings: Jeff Adair, Director of Facilities Management. No public email for him. Call the plant or copy GivinginTopeka@Resers.com.

The simple way to do it

Mail the letter to PO Box 8, Attn: Mark Reser.
Email the same text to consumeraffairs@resers.com and GivinginBeaverton@Resers.com, copy GivinginTopeka@Resers.com.
Call 503-643-6431 the same day and ask who in his office should also get the file.

The president’s inbox is not on the potato-salad website. The PO box is.

Good morning. Love you too.

You’re right to side-eye that claim. In Kansas a general contractor or subcontractor does not get a blanket right to buy job materials tax-exempt just because they hold a contractor’s license. The default rule is the opposite.

Kansas treats the contractor as the final consumer of materials that get incorporated into real property. The contractor pays state + local sales tax (or compensating use tax) at the supplier. A resale exemption certificate (ST-28A) cannot be used for those materials. That is spelled out in KAR 92-19-66 and KDOR Publication KS-1525. Same rule for GCs and subs.

When materials can be bought exempt

The exemption is project-specific, not person-specific. It happens through a numbered Project Exemption Certificate (PEC) issued by the Kansas Department of Revenue (or an authorized agent). The GC and every sub present that PEC number to suppliers. Without the PEC, the supplier is supposed to collect the tax.

Typical ways a PEC gets issued:

• The owner is a qualifying exempt entity (public or private school, hospital, many political subdivisions, certain churches/nonprofits, Habitat for Humanity housing, etc.).
• The project is financed with Industrial Revenue Bonds (IRBs). The city or county issues the bonds, applies for the PEC, and the exemption covers construction materials and labor for that project. This is the mechanism you were remembering. It is a common Topeka/Shawnee County economic-development tool, not a contractor perk.
• Certain other statutory econ-dev programs (HPIP-certified businesses, qualifying data centers, etc.).

A contractor-retailer (a supply house that also does installation work and keeps inventory for over-the-counter sales) can buy inventory with an ST-28W certificate, then must self-assess and pay the tax when they pull materials out of inventory for a job. That is not the same as a pure contractor buying tax-free at the yard.

Why it looks uneven

It is not random “grace.” The statute lists who and what qualifies. Private commercial or residential work for a taxable owner almost never qualifies unless the project is wrapped in IRBs or another listed program and someone actually applied for and received the PEC. Government, school, hospital, and IRB projects do. That is why some jobs on the same street get the break and the next one does not.

If Boldman is presenting a PEC on a specific job, ask to see the certificate number and what project it is tied to. If he is just telling suppliers “I’m a contractor so no tax,” that is not how KDOR writes the rules.

Labor is a separate analysis (original construction labor is often not taxed; most remodel/repair labor is). Materials stay taxable to the contractor unless a PEC is in play.

Official sources: KDOR Pub. KS-1525 (contractors) and KS-1520 / the PEC pages on ksrevenue.gov. Worth a look if you want the exact forms.

What “housing, housing, housing” is doing politically

Yes — there are official reports. And no, the “housing shortage” talk is not only about free housing for the homeless. Officials are folding several different problems into one slogan.

The reports they actually cite

The city’s main document is the Citywide Housing Market Study and Strategy (July 2020). It still underpins later RHID write-ups, the 2024 implementation-plan metrics, Consolidated Plan language, and a lot of council/chamber talking points.

HUD’s latest independent snapshot is the Topeka Housing Market Profile as of April 1, 2025. It does not describe a collapsing market. It calls the sales market balanced and the rental market slightly tight.

Other numbers in circulation:

• AEI Housing Center (March 2026): Kansas as a whole is short about 4,200 homes — roughly 0.3% of statewide stock. That is a modest gap, not a 10,000-unit local emergency.
• City Manager Robert Perez (Feb 2026): about 900 units short downtown.
• Topeka Housing Authority CEO Trey George (March 2026): Topeka needs roughly 10,000 additional units across all price ranges. That figure is much larger than HUD or AEI and looks like several 20-year “need” buckets stacked together.
• A 2022 RHID needs memo updated the 2020 study to about 2,367 units of net demand for a “balanced” market.

So the reports exist. The size of the shortage depends on who is talking and what they are counting.

What the market actually looks like

Topeka is not San Francisco or Austin. Prices are still low by national standards, and there is not a raw “no roofs left” crisis.

Sales

• HUD: sales vacancy about 1.2%; market balanced. Average sale price about $236,000 in the year ending Feb 2025, up 7%.
• Recent local/realtor figures: median sale often in the $184,000–$227,500 range; homes sell fast (roughly 8–19 days) at or near list. Demand for existing houses is real.

Rentals

• HUD: overall rental vacancy 7.4% (down from 9.9% in 2020); apartments about 7.2%; average apartment rent about $941. “Slightly tight,” not a 1% vacancy squeeze.
• Listing sites put typical Topeka rents around $850–$1,000. Cheap compared with the country; still a stretch for low-wage households.

Population

• HUD: Topeka MSA population about 233,000, basically unchanged from 2020. This is not a boomtown absorbing tens of thousands of new households.

The 2020 city study itself said something officials rarely repeat: Topeka already had enough units to house everyone and then some, with about 6,000 vacant units (11%), and vacancy as high as 17–21% in parts of east and central Topeka. More than 40% of the stock was built before 1960. The problem they defined was quality, price, type, and location — not a missing 10,000 empty lots.

That mismatch still explains a lot: empty or worn houses in older neighborhoods, and a tight market for decent starter homes, townhomes, and clean rentals.

Production is the real constraint they can point to

Where the “shortage” claim is strongest is how little has been built since 2008.

• Shawnee County private housing permits: 540 (2021), then 199 / 206 / 218 in 2022–2024. The Chamber’s line is that average annual permits are down about two-thirds from the five years before the 2008 crash.
• City of Topeka 2024: 112 new housing units permitted inside the city. That is a trickle.
• 2025 city YTD through early November jumped because of multifamily: 350 residential units, including 250 in 5+ unit buildings. That is downtown/incentive-driven product, not a wave of $200k starter houses.
• HUD (year ending March 2025): about 330 for-sale units permitted metro-wide and only 40 rental units.

The 2020 study wanted hundreds of units a year. The city has mostly delivered far fewer, except when a big apartment deal lands.

Homelessness is a separate, smaller number

Latest official Point-in-Time count (June 24, 2026):

• 460 people / 379 households
• 202 unsheltered
• Down from a peak of 546 in July 2024 and 502 in January 2026.

That is a serious local problem. It is not a 5,000- or 10,000-unit housing gap. PIT counts also miss people doubled up, and they do not measure addiction, mental illness, or whether someone will stay housed. Treating street homelessness as if it were just “we didn’t build enough apartments” is the part of the rhetoric that does not hold up.

Subsidized housing waitlists are a better measure of income-restricted demand:

• Public housing: 744 THA units; waitlist recently cited around 300.
• Section 8: list was closed for years with 2,000+ names; THA briefly reopened it in spring 2026 after working through that backlog. About 938 Housing Choice Vouchers in use.

That is real need at the bottom of the income scale. It is still not the same thing as “Topeka has no housing.”

What “housing, housing, housing” is doing politically

Officials are bundling four products under one word:

1. Low-income / LIHTC / public housing / vouchers — waitlists, trust fund, possible extra sales tax slice.
2. Workforce / “missing middle” — duplex/triplex/quad changes, starter product that private builders have not delivered at volume.
3. Downtown and market-rate apartments — The Hutch (~192 units), Union at Tower District, tax incentives. Perez has said those two projects are “a little over 400 units” at both ends of attainability.
4. Homeless services and shelters — Compassion Impact Center, CoC funding, PIT counts.

City Manager Perez has also floated a tenth-of-a-cent sales tax: about $4 million a year, split between the affordable housing trust fund and a market-rate housing fund. That tells you the slogan is being used to justify both social housing and developer incentives.

The 2024 implementation metrics showed the city lagging its own targets, especially workforce rentals (only a handful counted toward a 400-unit goal). Affordable-rental counts looked better mostly because of emergency vouchers and LIHTC, not a private building boom.

What’s really going on

• There is an official study trail. The 2020 city study is the mother document.
• There is underbuilding of new, livable product — especially starter homes and good mid-price rentals — after 2008.
• There is cost burden at the bottom: the 2020 study said about 30% of households paid more than 30% of income for housing, and it estimated a need on the order of 5,000 units at or below 60% of AMI.
• There is not a citywide unit shortage on the scale of the loudest quotes. HUD still calls sales balanced. Vacancy in older neighborhoods has been high. Population is flat.
• Homelessness is real (~460 people) and is not the same problem as “we need 10,000 more units.”
• “Housing shortage” is now a policy umbrella: it supports zoning changes, land-bank lots, LIHTC, Housing Trust Fund money, and tax breaks for downtown apartments.

The cleanest way to hear the slogan is: officials are short of the kind of housing they want to take credit for building — subsidized, workforce, and new downtown product — while the existing cheap-but-tired stock and a small unsheltered population get rolled into the same speech.