@couponvan it is often Home owner association's at vacation locations with the absolute worst drinking water and waste water infrastructure. It is very likely that the drinking water infrastructure at your FIRE house is operating beyond it's expected lifespan and was poorly maintained to boot. $400/year is way to low just for drinking water, let alone maintenance of the other amenities.
Many water system's provide fire protection as well as the safest drinking water ever distributed to people over hundreds of square miles. You can think of fixed costs as the price to get any of this incredible resource delivered to your home AND safe to drink.
Almost all of the drinking water costs listed here are way too low to be sustainable, in the vast majority of situations. There are, of course, economies of scale to take into consideration, but generally drinking water fees do not cover all of the cost of providing drinking water to customers - these are made up through subsidizes or by passing costs to future generations with bonds. In VT, our smallest, most vulnerable communities charge their customers over $1,000/year for drinking water. These systems don't have individual meters and every connection is charged a flat fee. If a water system finds itself in this situation, the whole Town is living on borrowed time. EPA and USDA can't throw money at these places fast enough to keep people living there.
My, supposedly responsibly maintained water system, charges my family of 6 less than $75/month for drinking water and wastewater, this amount is enough for the Town to cover the 25% of infrastructure improvement costs USDA funding asks us to pay - my drinking water is subsidized to the tune of 75% of capital costs. I never fail to exclaim to my children the extreme luxury of pressurized water coming from our water reservoir, through house sized steel filters filled with coal and gravel, treated with life saving chemicals so we don't die from diarrhea, pushed through hundreds of miles of metal pipe buried 100 years ago, stored in giant glass and steel towers, coming up our road into our basement and running to each of our taps, pouring out for us to enjoy.
As others have mentioned, individual water systems and septic systems are certainly not less expensive. Some people can pretend their septic system doesn't cost money because they might have enough property to ignore the untreated human waste just beneath the ground surface, intermingling with the ground water, but a new modern septic system doesn't cost less than $5,000 under any circumstance and in many cases runs between $20,000-$50,000 with the perverse reality that the more expensive systems will fail soonest and fail spectacularly with human feces pooling in your lawn. While drinking water wells and springs are rarely monitored for contaminants, run dry for nothing, and cost thousands of dollars to replace.
