Georgetown Mayor Jay Doyle will open city hall to residents Tuesday for a public forum on rising utility costs, giving residents a direct line to city leadership on an issue that has hit household budgets hard.

The forum will give city officials and residents a chance to work through the problem together. Leaders plan to walk through the city’s budget, outline current spending on utilities, and listen to suggestions from residents on how to bring rates down.

Doyle has been direct about the stakes. “The utilities are a huge issue here in the city,” he said, signaling that the forum is not a ceremonial exercise but a substantive attempt to find solutions.

Georgetown, a small historic city of roughly 10,000 residents on the Waccamaw Neck, relies on municipal utility services for water and sewer. Like many South Carolina municipalities, the city has faced mounting pressure from aging infrastructure, supply chain costs, and energy market volatility. Those upstream costs tend to flow directly onto ratepayers, often with little warning and even less explanation.

That lack of transparency is precisely what forums like this one are designed to address, and Doyle deserves credit for calling one. Too often, utility rate increases show up on bills as accomplished facts, with residents learning the details only after the vote has been taken and the budget adopted. An open forum before decisions are locked in gives residents a genuine opportunity to shape the outcome rather than simply absorb it.

Whether that opportunity translates into real policy influence depends on what happens after Tuesday night.

The critical questions are not just about the size of a rate increase, but about where the money is actually going. Residents should push city officials for a line-by-line accounting of utility fund expenditures. They should ask whether administrative overhead has grown disproportionately compared to direct service costs. They should ask when the city last conducted an independent rate study, and what that study found.

They should also ask about capital improvement timelines. Aging water and sewer infrastructure is expensive to maintain and more expensive to ignore. If Georgetown has deferred repairs over multiple budget cycles, residents are likely paying for that delay now in the form of emergency repairs and inefficiency costs that show up in their monthly bills.

A public records request for the city’s most recent utility fund audit, capital improvement plan, and any consultant reports on rate-setting methodology would tell residents and watchdogs a great deal about whether current rates reflect genuine cost pressures or decisions made without adequate public scrutiny.

For low-income residents and seniors on fixed incomes, utility increases are not an abstract budget line. They represent real choices between paying the bill and covering groceries or medication. Georgetown’s leadership should come to Tuesday’s forum prepared to discuss whether the city has or should create a utility assistance program, a rate discount structure for qualifying households, or a payment plan option that prevents service shutoffs.

Other South Carolina municipalities have implemented tiered rate structures that charge lower rates for baseline consumption and higher rates for heavy use. That model tends to protect lower-income households, which typically consume less, while ensuring the city still collects adequate revenue from larger users. Whether Georgetown has evaluated a similar approach is a fair and pressing question.

The forum is scheduled for Tuesday. The city has not yet published a full agenda or list of officials who will attend alongside the mayor. Residents looking to participate should contact city hall directly for time and location details.

Georgetown residents would do well to show up prepared. Bring your recent utility bills. Ask specific questions about rate methodology. Request documentation that you can review after the meeting. And if the city cannot answer those questions Tuesday night, ask when and how it will.

Public forums work best when residents treat them as the beginning of a conversation rather than the end of one. Doyle has opened a door. What comes through it depends largely on how many residents decide to walk in.