Writing prompt Grade 12 Social Studies & Civics
Should Kirkmead Move Water Revenue to the General Fund?
A grade 12 argument prompt on a fictional city's yearly transfer of water rate revenue into the general fund, with budget figures, an exemplar, and a four-level rubric.
Objectives
- Students will state a defensible claim about a municipal budget transfer and support it with supplied figures.
- Students will state and answer the strongest counterclaim to their position.
- Students will explain how each option shifts cost between ratepayers and property taxpayers.
Vocabulary
- Enterprise fund
- A separate money account a city keeps for its water system. Water bill payments go in, water system costs come out, and the money is not mixed with other city spending.
Also: transfer, general fund, cost of service, backlog
Teacher overview
Most cities run their water utility as an enterprise fund, kept separate from the general fund because the money comes from rates paid for a service rather than from taxes. Many of those same cities move a share of the utility's revenue back into the general fund each year, calling it payment for services the city provides to the utility, a return on the city's investment, or a substitute for the property taxes a private company would pay. This prompt gives students a fictional city's figures and asks them to argue for keeping, capping, or ending that transfer. The misconception to correct first is the common student view that all of a city's money is one pot; rate revenue is collected for a specific service, and how far a council may redirect it is a real and contested question.
Prompt
Background. The fictional city of Kirkmead owns its water utility. Read the figures below, all of them invented for this prompt, before you write.
The utility collects $14,200,000 a year in water rates. Every year the council transfers $1,420,000 of that revenue into the city's general fund, which pays for police, parks, and street work. That transfer equals 10 percent of water revenue and about 3.7 percent of the city's $38,000,000 general fund. The average residential water bill in Kirkmead is $58 a month.
The utility's engineers report that replacing the city's aging water mains would cost $46,000,000. The utility currently spends $1,100,000 a year on main replacement. At that pace the work would take more than forty years, and the utility reports 38 main breaks last year.
The council defends the transfer on three grounds. City departments do the utility's billing, legal work, hiring, and fleet maintenance. The city built the original system with taxpayer money and is entitled to a return on it. A privately owned utility would pay city property taxes, and this transfer stands in for those.
The utility's rate consultant reviewed the first ground and found that the city services actually provided to the utility are worth about $520,000 a year, well under the transfer amount. The city finance director responds that ending the transfer would require either a property tax increase of about 4 percent or equivalent cuts to city services.
Your task. Write an argument essay addressed to the Kirkmead City Council recommending one of these three actions:
- keep the transfer as it is,
- cap the transfer at the documented cost of services the city provides to the utility,
- end the transfer over five years.
State a claim, support it with at least two reasons drawn from the figures above, state the strongest counterclaim to your position, and answer it. Explain in your essay who pays more and who pays less under your recommendation. Write four to six paragraphs.
Planning Organizer
Complete every row before you draft. Keep each cell to one or two sentences.
| Part of the argument | Your notes |
|---|---|
| Claim: which of the three actions you recommend | |
| Reason 1, with the figure that supports it | |
| Reason 2, with the figure that supports it | |
| Who pays more under your recommendation, and who pays less | |
| Counterclaim: the strongest argument against your position | |
| Rebuttal: why your position still holds | |
| Closing: what you want the council to do first |
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Exemplar & Rubric
Exemplar response
The Kirkmead City Council should cap the annual transfer at the documented cost of the services the city provides to the utility, roughly $520,000 a year, and direct the remaining $900,000 to main replacement. This keeps the city whole for the work it actually performs while ending a practice that has quietly become a tax collected through the water bill.
The first reason is that the transfer is far larger than the cost it claims to cover. The city's own rate consultant valued the billing, legal, hiring, and fleet services at about $520,000 a year, yet the transfer takes $1,420,000. The gap of about $900,000 is not payment for anything the city delivers to the utility. It is general revenue collected from ratepayers, and unlike a property tax it takes no account of what a household owns or earns.
The second reason is that the utility cannot afford it. Replacing Kirkmead's mains would cost $46,000,000, and the utility spends $1,100,000 a year on that work, a pace that stretches past forty years while the system produced 38 breaks last year. Redirecting the excess transfer would nearly double annual replacement spending without raising the $58 monthly bill by a cent. Every year the transfer continues, the backlog grows and the eventual rate increase gets larger.
The council will answer that ending or shrinking the transfer forces a property tax increase of about 4 percent or cuts to police, parks, and streets, and that the city built the system with taxpayer money and deserves a return. That objection has real weight, because the general fund pressure is immediate while the pipe backlog is slow. Two things answer it. First, a capped transfer still pays the city for its services, so the city is not subsidizing the utility. Second, the return on the taxpayers' original investment has been collected for decades, while the pipes those taxpayers paid for are now failing, so the honest way to charge for city services is a documented fee rather than a fixed share of revenue.
The fairest reading of these figures is that Kirkmead has been funding general services with a charge that every household pays through its water bill, regardless of income, and that the water system is being drained to do it. The council should adopt the cap this budget year, publish the service-cost study that supports the $520,000 figure, and commit the freed money to main replacement in the same ordinance so that a future council cannot quietly move it back.
Rubric
| Criterion | Emerging | Developing | Proficient | Advanced |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Claim | No clear recommendation, or the position shifts during the essay. | Names one of the three actions but states it vaguely or only at the end. | States one of the three actions clearly in the opening and holds it throughout. | States the action and its specific terms, such as the cap amount and where the freed money goes. |
| Evidence and reasoning | Uses no figures from the background, or misstates them. | Uses one figure, with the connection to the claim left implied. | Uses at least two figures accurately and explains how each supports the claim. | Uses figures in combination, for example setting the transfer gap against the replacement backlog, and explains what the comparison shows. |
| Counterclaim and rebuttal | No counterclaim appears. | States a counterclaim but dismisses it without an answer. | States the strongest counterclaim fairly and answers it with a reason. | Concedes what is true in the counterclaim, then shows why the recommendation still holds. |
| Cost incidence | Does not say who pays. | Mentions ratepayers or taxpayers but not the shift between them. | Explains who pays more and who pays less under the recommendation. | Explains the shift and notes that a charge built into every water bill falls differently than a tax on property value. |
| Organization and conventions | Paragraphs are unordered and errors interfere with meaning. | Some structure, with weak transitions and repeated errors. | Four to six ordered paragraphs, controlled sentences, and few errors. | Structure advances the argument, and the closing names a first concrete step for the council. |
Differentiation
Support
Give these students the claim row of the organizer already completed for one of the three options, along with the two figures that support it, so their drafting begins from a stated position. Allow a three-paragraph essay in which the counterclaim and rebuttal share the middle paragraph.
Extension
Ask students to write the city finance director's one-paragraph reply to their own essay, then revise the rebuttal so it answers that reply directly. Strong revisions will address the timing problem, since the general fund gap arrives immediately and the pipe savings arrive slowly.
ELL supports
Pre-teach "transfer," "enterprise fund," "backlog," and "counterclaim" with a simple diagram showing two labeled money boxes and an arrow between them. Provide sentence frames for each organizer row, such as "The council should ___ because ___" and "Some will argue ___, but ___." Allow the organizer to be completed in phrases before drafting in sentences.
Extensions
Have students find whether their own city transfers utility revenue to its general fund, using the city's adopted budget document, and write one paragraph comparing what they find with Kirkmead's practice. A second option is a short council simulation in which three students present the three options and the class votes, with each voter naming the figure that decided them.