Lowest in Two Counties: Inside Sherman's Push to Keep Utility Rates at the Floor

In an era when local governments treat the monthly utility bill as a quiet revenue tap, one North Texas city is moving in the opposite direction. Sherman — the Grayson County seat of roughly 52,000 people — spent Monday night comparing its water and solid-waste rates to every other city in Collin and Grayson counties, and the verdict was unusually straightforward: Sherman has the lowest bills in both.

The review came during the city council's annual budget discussions on July 21, 2026, and it didn't happen by accident. Mayor Shawn Teamann told KXII the council had specifically directed staff to run the comparison — and to put the result in front of the public.

"We told staff a few meetings ago to go out and do a study to find out between every city of Collin County and every city in Grayson County how the city of Sherman compared — for transparency purposes for us as a council and for the community," Teamann said.

That word — transparency — is doing real work in that sentence. Most cities only benchmark their rates when a resident files an open-records request or a reporter starts asking. Sherman commissioned the study on its own and laid the numbers out for the community.

A floor, not a ceiling

Having the lowest rates is the easy part. The harder question is whether Sherman intends to keep them there — and Teamann says yes.

"Over the next couple of months we will continue to work on that and hone that in and hopefully make sure Sherman remains the lowest cost system in the area," he said.

That is a notably different posture from the one most growing cities adopt. Sherman has been swelling — the Census Bureau's 2025 estimate puts it at about 52,400, up from roughly 43,700 in 2020, a nearly 20% jump in five years. The standard playbook in a boomtown is to let the rate base grow, expand the apparatus of government, and quietly let the per-household bill creep up to fund it. Population growth and shifting representation have a way of turning into bigger budgets and bigger bills. Sherman is explicitly refusing that trade.

The mayor was also honest about the limits of cost-cutting — a candor you don't often hear from officials angling for the next office.

"Sometimes we can drive the cost down with many factors operationally, but there is still just a base minimum cost to provide that service," Teamann said.

In other words: you can squeeze a utility, but you can't wish away the cost of clean water and weekly trash pickup. That is a government official drawing a line between efficiency and the floor below which service collapses — exactly the distinction voters should reward and regulators too often blur when they layer mandates onto the same bill.

Core services, not empire

What makes Sherman's posture worth noting is what it prioritizes. The rates fund drinking water and weekly garbage collection — the unglamorous, non-negotiable functions of municipal government. City officials acknowledged that rate levels "directly affect residents," which sounds obvious until you remember how many councils treat the utility fund as a slush pot for unrelated priorities.

Teamann was blunt about where the line gets drawn.

"Whatever it costs to make sure we're maintaining clean drinking water to homes is what it costs," he said.

Strip away the press-release phrasing and that is a fairly conservative theory of local government: figure out what the core service actually costs, charge only that, and resist the temptation to make the water bill carry the weight of everything else the city might like to do.

It is also a quiet rebuke to the cities that have spent the last decade raising water and sewer rates faster than inflation while pleading infrastructure backlogs — the same backlogs that mysteriously never close no matter how high the bill climbs. Sherman is treating the utility bill as cost recovery, not a growth engine. It is the opposite of the model in which officials rubber-stamp their own expansions and pass the tab to the household.

The lesson

A city of 52,000 in North Texas is not going to make national headlines for a budget work session. But the principle is the headline. A council that commissions its own rate study, publishes the result, and pledges to stay the cheapest in two counties is doing the unglamorous work of self-restraint — and it is doing it in a fast-growing community where the political pressure to spend is highest.

Sherman's utility rates will stay on the table as the council finalizes next year's budget. Whether "lowest in the region" survives the next round of growth is the real test. For now, the mayor has drawn the line where most won't: at the base cost of clean water and a weekly trash run — and not a dime more for the empire beside it.