The national museum for art of the 21st century in Rome, called the Maxxi, hopes to become a global player in contemporary art.

Jay-Z greets art-world guests before a taping of the music video of his song “Picasso Baby” at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea.

“I have no idea why I’m here,” the artist Marilyn Minter said, as she sat in a temporary V.I.P. room at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea on a steamy Wednesday. “I’m just a fame whore.”

Ms. Minter was one of hundreds of fans and art-world types — Kalup Linzy; Lawrence Weiner; Andres Serrano; George Condo; Yvonne Force Villareal; Lisa Phillips, the director of the New Museum; and Agnes Gund, MoMA’s president emerita — invited to take part in a live filming of Jay-Z’s music video for “Picasso Baby,” the art-centric song off his new album, “Magna Carta ...Holy Grail.”

The rap marathon was inspired by the performance artist Marina Abramovic’s 2010 MoMA exhibition, “The Artist Is Present,” said the art dealer Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, who is Jay-Z’s art adviser and was a host of the event along with the film director Mark Romanek. “Jay has been wanting to do something durational for some time.”

The video shoot added a welcome frisson to Chelsea as the dozy season hit its annual doldrums. And it livened up a corner of the Web, where the topic of art-world fame whores racing to sell out can be counted on to set the thumb-tappers in motion.

Stephanie Theodore, a Bushwick gallery owner, tweeted a wry suggestion that the Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei divorce his wife, marry Ms. Abramovic and form a megacult. Why not invite James Franco, the art blog Hyperallergic added, and make it an unholy threesome?

At a mere six hours, the taping was a water-cooler break by the usual standards of Ms. Abramovic, who during the run of “The Artist Is Present,” spent the equivalent of 30 full days sitting immobile in the museum atrium, while spectators took turns sitting opposite her. Still, as Mr. Linzy, a performance artist, said, “It’s epic.”

Dressed for the performance not in the Tom Ford suits he favors, but a pair of black jeans, white sneakers, a white short-sleeve shirt, a heavy gold chain, a gumball-size pinkie ring and a wristwatch from his collection of six-figure timepieces, Jay-Z rapped from a platform facing a bench reminiscent of the set of Ms. Abramovic’s original artwork.

Like Ms. Abramovic, he was a mesmeric presence, shifting spectators around as though they were iron filings drawn by a magnet. With his usual braggadocio, Jay-Z rapped lyrics like: “I want a Picasso, in my casa ... I wanna Rothko, no I wanna brothel,” and “What’s it gonna take for me to go, For y’all to see I’m the modern-day Pablo Picasso baby.”

He reminded his listeners that, like most every self-respecting millionaire mogul these days, he is an avid collector of contemporary art, although he alone turns the pursuit to his singular ends in lyrics that knowingly name-check everyone from Jeff Koons to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

In “Picasso Baby,” Jay-Z’s grab bag of references includes Mr. Condo, Art Basel Miami Beach, Francis Bacon, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern and Andy Warhol. He cites Basquiat twice, preening his insider knowledge by lyrically incorporating both the artist’s given name and Samo, his original graffiti tag.

To some spectators, it was particularly bracing to watch a hip-hop god colonize a white cube world that must once have seemed as distant as Mars from the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, the projects where Jay-Z grew up (and where he was known by his given name, Shawn Carter). “For a young black man in America to be on his level of success and rapping about art, and not what he’s wearing, is the coolest thing,” the artist Mickalene Thomas said.

“People have to realize he’s referencing artists who have been shape-shifters in themselves,” she added. “They have to know that a young person hearing him saying ‘I am Picasso,’ is going to look up Picasso.”

Ms. Minter, whose lush photorealist paintings comment on glamour and decadence, said, “Jay-Z speaks to the times we live in.”

An Mr. Weiner, an austere conceptualist, added, “Jay-Z speaks with the times he lives in.”

Unquestionably, Jay-Z manipulates our credulous times as deftly as he did a crowd that also included Judd Apatow, the designer Cynthia Rowley, Alan Cumming, Adam Driver and the artist Marcel Dzama, who came to the filming wearing a cow costume he constructed for a recent video.

“It’s great how he has really recreated the whole MoMA feel,” Mr. Dzama said. And it helped that Ms. Abramovic herself was on hand, arriving theatrically an hour into the event and emerging from a stretch S.U.V. with a turbaned chauffeur. Wearing one of the floor-length black dresses that a friend, the Givenchy designer Riccardo Tisci, creates for her, Ms. Abramovic stepped from the vehicle and glided into the gallery with the hypnotic gravity of some loopy space priestess from a sci-fi kitsch classic of the ’50s.

Cameras in her wake, she parted the crowd — “Queen of Outer Space” meets the hip-hop monarch — crossing the gallery to mount a low platform, where she and Jay-Z engaged in a pas de deux sure to go down as among the oddest moments in the annals of performance art.

Two minutes later, the dance had already been posted to Vine and gone art-world viral. “OK the video in Infinite Jest that entertains you to death has finally come and it is the Vine of Jay-Z & Marina Abramovic,” wrote @LindsayZoladz. “R.I.P. US ALL.”

Don’t close the coffin lid quite yet.

Like Ms. Abramovic, whose stare-downs at MoMA left so many participants in tears that it inspired the blog “Marina Abramovic Made Me Cry,” the Jay-Z video was too sincere, even in its cynicism, to be all bad.

To a large extent, that was owed to the hip-hop artist’s way with the crowd, both mellow and collaborative. When a generator cut out, taking with it the background music, Jay-Z called out: “Anyone got unusual talents? Anyone can do something awesome?” He then invited a ballet dancer to perform some pirouettes; the performance artist Jacolby Satterwhite to show off his vogueing; and Kiah Victoria, a music student, to blow the roof off the gallery with her a cappella rendition of a torch song.

“I just love the way Jay-Z riffs on what Marina did,” said Roselee Goldberg, the performance art historian and founder of Performa.

That the boo-birds on Twitter failed to share the love will doubtless help Jay-Z’s cause or, anyway, his record sales. The shock and peril that once characterized much performance art had been co-opted by a marketing wizard, turned, as the bloggers carped, into a tool of aesthetic predictability.

Here it seems proper to resuscitate both Andy Warhol’s famous observation that “being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art,” and to paraphrase an aphorism often attributed to the actual Picasso: mediocre artists borrow, great artists steal.

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A Big Sugar ad campaign has struck a sour note with environmentalists.

In fliers mailed to thousands of South Florida homes and in a television spot, the sugar industry touts legislation signed by Gov. Rick Scott in May — which extends a $25-an-acre tax on cane fields to help pay for an $880 million expansion of projects to reduce the flow of farm pollution flowing in the Everglades — as a “historic partnership” with environmentalists and the state that will “put the final phase of restoration into place.”

The ad boasts that “smart farming techniques" have helped preserve the Everglades and proclaims farmers the “largest private funders of Everglades restoration” with some $400 million invested in the effort to date.

The state’s three largest growers — Florida Crystals, U.S. Sugar and the Florida Sugar Cane Growers Cooperative — bankrolled the ad targeting key communities and residents in South Florida, said Brian Hughes, president of Tallahassee-based Meteoric Media Strategies, which created the ad. He wouldn’t discuss the cost or say how many people will get fliers, but called it a “modest” campaign.

“It’s not uncommon for coalitions and businesses to reach out in whatever media form to make sure people understand the facts,’’ said Hughes. “The sugar farmers are proud of the work they have put in to be part of the solution.’’

But two environmental leaders quoted in the flier supporting the legislation — Eric Draper of Florida Audubon and Eric Eikenberg of the Everglades Foundation — aren’t exactly on board with its message.

Both groups caught some flak during the legislative session from other activists who wanted the industry to pay more of the massive clean-up costs. The state has already spend some $1.2 billion constructing sprawling pollution-scrubbing artificial marshes that have not yet met strict water-quality standards for the Everglades.

Under pressure from federal judges overseeing two long-running environmental lawsuits, Scott championed an expanded clean-up plan expected to take several decades to construct. The law, aimed at raising $32 million a year, adds 10 years to a $25-per-acre tax that Everglades sugar growers pay, extending it to 2026. After that, the tax declines to $20 and then, in 2036, to $10 per acre.

Draper said the flier tells only “half of the story.”

The industry has significantly reduced its use of the damaging nutrient phosphorus, which harms native vegetation, but environmentalists contend farms should do more to reduce the volume of pollution that wash off fields after storms into South Florida’s canal system. They also argue that South Florida taxpayers, not the industry, have been stuck with the bulk of the clean-up costs through property taxes that support the South Florida Water Management District, which is managing the clean-up.

Eikenberg, chief executive officer of the Everglades Foundation, also said the bill addresses only one part of restoration efforts — water quality — and is far from the “final phase.”

There are billions of dollars of pending projects and decades of work ahead to boost the water supply and restore the natural flow to the River of Grass. That starts with a critical project for the Central Everglades that needs support from water managers to secure federal funding but has been questioned by the industry. Water managers face a key vote on the $2.2 billion suite of projects next week.

Jean-Michel Basquiat's painting "Untitled" set a world auction record for the artist when it sold at Christie's on Tuesday for £18.76 million.

By SOUREN MELIKIAN

Published: June 28, 2013

LONDON — Even minor auctions can herald small changes in a shrinking market.

The sales of contemporary art held here this week at Christie’s and Sotheby’s were surprisingly thin. Perhaps consignors feared that in these times of recession buyers might not fully respond to art that is not always obvious. After all, who can guarantee that a sponge dipped in blue paint will forever be recognized as a work of art?

One of those actually got that accolade Tuesday at Christie’s, where 51 lots sold for £70 million, about $106 million, but, annoyingly, 13 others were left stranded. You never can tell.

Luckily, one picture accounted for almost a quarter of the proceeds. Jean-Michel Basquiat’s painting “Untitled,” done in 1982 when the young American was 21, is executed in the cartoon manner that remained his trademark until his death six years later. The rough lines and the color spread in random fits of child-like enthusiasm simulate street graffiti. The outsized picture set a world auction record for the artist at £18.76 million.

The next three top prices for paintings greeted works that all differed hugely from each other.

A landscape painted with considerable skill by Peter Doig brought £7.34 million. Dated 1994, “Jetty” is filled with an atmosphere of mystery, at once lyrical and threatening. A small shadowy figure stands on a jetty gazing at a boat in the distance against a backdrop of dark olive shot through with white streaks suggestive of a snowy mountainside.

Touches of color applied with the tip of the brush create a scintillating pointillist effect that contrasts with the hazy dark tree shapes in the foreground. The landscape, which reconnects with the traditional painter’s art in an innovative style, is far removed from Basquiat’s picture.

So is the next one down on the price scale, Nicolas de Staël’s “Marseille,” which sold for £3.08 million. The supposed view of the French Mediterranean harbor painted in 1954 is effectively an abstract work in which the vague memory of structures defies identification. The violent color contrast in red and blue sends back an echo to a letter written by the Russian-born artist: “One never paints what one sees or thinks one sees; rather one records the shock one has received.”

The third highest price for a picture at Christie’s, £2.8 million, says all about the enduring fascination for the 1960s, when Pop Art broke out on the New York scene. Roy Lichtenstein’s “Cup of Coffee” dates from 1961. The linear monochrome image that recalls some posters of the period is a far cry from the strongly colored style inspired by comic strips that defines Pop Art. This makes the price quite extraordinary. It apparently greeted the name as much as the picture.

If doubts lingered on that score, the £2.7 million paid for the sponge dipped in blue paint by Yves Klein would dispel them. “SE 181,” as Klein called the sponge stuck on a metal stem also painted blue, is signed and dated 1961, a year before the French artist’s death at age 34. Some might believe that there is a limit to the time you can spend gazing in admiration at a blue sponge. But Klein has been celebrated for several decades and his name looks good in an inventory.

In short, notoriety defined by the media, whose role in the making of contemporary art prices has steadily increased over the past 50 years, is the common denominator among the paintings that performed well at Christie’s. That criterion is equally relevant to three-dimensional art.

A world record auction was thus established for Eduardo Chillida when an eight-meter-high chunk of steel executed in 2001 sold for £4.09 million. The 26-foot rectangle that broadens at the top, like some anvil wrought for a world of giants, was called by the Spanish artist, “Buscando La Luz IV” (Looking for the Light IV). The cryptic title goads viewers into marveling about the exact meaning of the 17-ton piece, which can certainly not be ignored. And therein lies the deeper reason for the gigantic price. Call it the “shock and awe” effect that is a fundamental factor in the success of contemporary art.

That same criterion worked at Sotheby’s on Wednesday evening, where the auction of contemporary art was just as disparate. Of the 68 works offered, 53 found takers, realizing £75.8 million.

Topping the lot was Francis Bacon’s “Three Studies of Isabel Rawsthorne,” which was dated 1966 and made £11.28 million. It was not quite the roaring success expected by its owner, as may be gathered from the £10 million to £15 million estimate plus a sale charge in excess of 12 percent. Even so, the price paid for a triptych of three small portraits was phenomenal. The consignor who bought the Bacon at Christie’s in 2004 for £2.35 million can hardly feel sorry for himself. A glance at the three faces that seem to be melting away in Bacon’s best nightmarish manner is enough to reveal that the triptych is not the easiest work to sell.

The second highest price, £10.44 million, also greeted a Bacon, “Head III” painted in 1949. The arresting bespectacled face has a ghoulish expression as it peers through vertical streaks of gray and white that resemble rainwater brushed by wind across a dingy glass pane.

A Lucio Fontana of a rare type fetched the third top price at Sotheby’s. “Concetto Spaziale, le Chiese di Venezia,” which went for £4.45 million, is a square composition in which two yellow crescent moons are confronted in a nondescript space painted a deep purple. Holes have been irregularly cut through the entire surface. Never mind that the title does not make the meaning of it all any clearer. It is big and it catches the eye from far away. That rescued the Fontana, sold under the lower end of the estimate.

Two lots down, it was the turn of a 1959 abstract painting by Pierre Soulages to fetch a large price, £4.33 million. Enormous strokes of blue color are piled on top of each other. Violence is conveyed by the thrust of the brushwork. At Sotheby’s viewing, the picture had a compelling presence that struck me as dwarfing whatever happened to be nearby.

In the same vein, the fury conveyed by the slashes cut through another Fontana canvas, this one painted white, helped “Concetto Spaziale, Attese” from 1965 to match the reserve price — at a steep £4.33 million. The consignor earned the right to some self-congratulation — in 1997, the Fontana cost him or her £155,500, also at Sotheby’s London.

Unfortunately for contemporary art consignors, the impact of a visual shock cannot be guaranteed to last forever. Buyers in search of security have a weak spot for artists no longer alive. They instinctively feel their art has been consecrated by the passage of time.

Hailed for decades in the media, artists as far apart as Bacon, de Staël or Lichtenstein are perceived as equally entrenched in the cultural history of the recent past. The works do not matter so much for what they are as for what has been written about them.

Yet the state of the market this week suggested that those holding contemporary art and postwar works by artists now dead fear that even that is no longer an iron-clad guarantee of future success.

The New York November auctions will tell us whether the consignors’ reticence this week was a mere passing fit of bad feeling. Should it persist, it could adversely affect market values.

The South Florida Water Management District, one of the state’s largest landowners with some 1.5 million acres ranging from wild banks of the restored Kissimmee River to bird-covered marshes at the southern end of Miami-Dade County, is pondering unloading some of its vast holdings.

Environmentalists are closely watching what the district is calling a “land assessment process,” worried that an agency that has been forced to slash its budget over the past few years by Gov. Rick Scott and the Legislature may shed important acreage that could shrink wildlife habitat, compromise Everglades restoration projects or, worse, wind up in the hands of developers.

The district’s initial assessment, for example, includes 209 acres along Old Cutler Road bordering Biscayne Bay in Cutler Bay, which includes a 138-acre chunk the district purchased for $24.5 million less than three years ago to protect it from pending conversion into suburbia.

“Are we really going to get into the business of the South Florida Water Management District selling land fronting Biscayne Bay to a private developer?’’ said Charles Lee, director of advocacy for Audubon of Florida.

Water managers insist that’s not the intention and say they expect to keep the vast majority of the lands. One goal is to transfer or swap parcels to other government agencies, where they would continue to be used as conservation or recreation areas. The district, for instance, is negotiating transferring ownership of the 3,300-acre-plus Strazzulla wetlands in Palm Beach County to the bordering Loxahatchee National Wildlife Refuge.

“Clearly, we would like to see that lands bought with public money continue to be used in some public fashion,’’ said Tommy Strowd, the district’s deputy executive director.

But water managers also won’t rule out that some scattered tracts that no longer serve useful purposes may wind up for sale to private bidders — but only after another round of more thorough evaluation and appraisals, public comment and approval from the agency’s governing board.

Lawmakers ordered the state’s water-management districts to slash property tax rates by nearly a third several years ago, but Strowd said the district is not pursuing the assessment as a money maker — though it could wind up saving millions in maintenance costs.

It comes, he said, as part of an initiative ordered by Scott for every state agency to analyze whether public lands they manage fulfill “core missions.” In the case of the district, that’s defined as flood protection along with maintaining water supply, water quality and the ecological health of natural areas.

Some of the district’s parcels are clearly a poor fit — like the graceful home and 16-acre estate of former state lawmaker Edna Pearce Lockett along the Kissimmee River in Highlands County, which the district wound up with as part of a 1993 deal to acquire 423 surrounding acres. But other agencies have since passed on offers to take it over, largely because of the expense of maintaining it.

The U.S. Supreme Court gave the family of a Central Florida landowner – as well as property owners and developers across the state and country – a significant victory on Tuesday with a ruling that stands to make it tougher and more expensive for government agencies to protect the nation’s dwindling wetlands.

In a 5 to 4 decision, the court found that the St. Johns River Water Management District had imposed excessive demands on Coy Koontz Sr., who was denied a permit to build on a 15-acre plot outside of Orlando unless he offset or “mitigated” for paving over wetlands by restoring wetlands owned by the district several miles away.

Koontz died several years ago but his son, Coy Koontz Jr., said the family was ecstatic at winning a land-use legal battle dating back nearly two decades and giving other landowners “a bigger stick” to fight similar cases in the future.

“As my wife said, it certainly vindicates my father’s decision to take this fight on,” Koontz said during a media conference call organized by the Pacific Legal Foundation, a private property rights advocacy group that represented the family in the case.

Foundation attorney Paul Beard said the ruling would help protect landowners and set a higher bar for government regulators. “Anyone who owns a home or business and wants to make use of it, they will no longer be subject to willy-nilly extortion demands from permitting agencies,” he said.

But environmentalists, echoing dissenting justices, also warned that the ruling could weaken or undermine wetlands protection laws and other land-use regulations. Similar off-site “mitigation” agreements have long been an important tool for federal, state and local regulators trying to enforce a national “no net loss” of wetlands policy established by President George H. W. Bush in 1988.

The case started in 1994 when Koontz applied to dredge and fill 3.7 acres of his land while preserving the rest of the tract in Orange County’s Econlockhatchee River basin. The district rejected his plan, instead giving him the option of building on one acre or paying to restore district-owned wetlands several miles away to compensate for the environmental damage of plowing under wetlands on his own land.

Koontz sued instead, arguing the district’s demands constituted an illegal “taking” by denying him use of his land without fair compensation. He won a $376,000 award at a trial court level but the Florida Supreme Court overturned that decision in 2011, accepting the district’s argument that nothing had actually been taken from Koontz since he retained ownership of the land.

On appeal, the federal high court found the district actions violated Koontz’s property rights.

Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the conservative majority, said the district over-reached, failing to meet two key tests established in earlier rulings requiring agencies to show a “nexus” and “rough proportionality” when demanding that a property owner take actions or pay for outside work, such as wetlands mitigation or road widening, in order to obtain a permits.

The most deceptive and egregious action against taxpayers during the 2013 Florida legislative session was passage of HB 7065 and SB 768, which amended the 1994 Everglades Forever Act.

Rep. Matt Caldwell, R-Lehigh Acres, sponsored HB 7065 under the guise of increasing the sugar industry’s funding commitment to Everglades restoration when, in fact, his proposed amendment was a smoke screen to ensure that the sugar industry would be able to limit or cap its long-term obligation to fund Everglades restoration.

The 1994 Everglades Forever Act, which was ostensibly written to restore the Florida Everglades, capped the sugar industry’s clean-up costs at $320 million and obligated the public taxpayers for the remainder of the $16 billion restoration project. The so-called privilege tax of $25 per acre that the sugar industry pays to continue its discharge of pollution runoff to the Everglades, as well as to the Caloosahatchee and coastal estuaries, amounts to about $11 million per year. A truly insignificant sum in contrast to the billions required from the public to restore the Florida Everglades.

The $25 per acre privilege tax was scheduled to be reduced to $10 per acre in 2017 but the Caldwell amendment extended the $25 per acre to 2026. To the casual observer it would appear that the legislative action would ensure that the sugar industry continued to help fund Everglades restoration.

In actuality, the legislation provided the sugar industry the comfort level or certainty that its long term-funding commitment towards Everglades restoration would be significantly limited in scope. Instead of defending the sugar industry and suggesting that the taxpayers contribute an even greater amount to Everglades restoration, Rep. Caldwell should have supported an amendment to the Everglades Forever Act that increased the $25 privilege tax.

This would have ensured that the sugar industry paid its fair share towards Everglades restoration as opposed to the sugar industry continuing to receive special treatment as the Florida Legislature’s favorite welfare recipient and shift the tax burden onto the backs of the public.

Caldwell is quick to point out that the Everglades Foundation and Florida Audubon supported HB 7065, but the Sierra Club and The Conservancy of Southwest Florida took an opposing position that the legislation did not go far enough to level the funding formula between the sugar industry and the taxpayers for Everglades restoration.

In fact, the Everglades Foundation and Florida Audubon only struck a compromise to support HB 7065 because Caldwell was supporting an earlier version of an amendment that would have greatly weakened water quality standards and removed the 1993 Statement of Principles that had been a guide for restoration efforts over the last 20 years. With the objectionable provisions removed in the final draft amendment, the Everglades Foundation and Florida Audubon were in damage control mode and reluctantly accepted the continuation of an inequitable funding formula for Everglades restoration.

To put the sugar industry’s $11 million annual contribution to Everglades restoration in perspective, Lee County taxpayers pay in excess of $30 million per year to the Okeechobee levy for work by the South Florida Water Management District in the Everglades Agricultural Area to provide drainage and irrigation of the sugar cane fields south of Lake Okeechobee. Lee County’s return on the investment is polluted water, fish kills and harmful algae blooms including red tide.

Certainly, the more conservative and responsible approach would be to support public policy that protects the interest of struggling taxpayers and hold the sugar industry accountable for the destruction of precious public resources including the Everglades, Lake Okeechobee, Caloosahatchee and St. Lucie rivers and coastal estuaries.

The people have a right to know the truth, and it is time for the public to demand that the Florida Legislature represent the public interest and not the special interest.

Miami-Dade commissioners gave the go-ahead Tuesday for the county to raise its water and sewer fees to help pay for a multi-billion dollar plan to repair an antiquated water and sewer system.

Fees will go up by 8 percent in the 2014 budget year beginning Oct. 1. That money is projected to raise $30 million a year to back $4.25 billion in bonds — also authorized Tuesday — to fix the county’s crumbling pipes and pump stations.

The initial fee hike will amount to an additional $3.36 per month for the average residential user, according to county administrators, increasing the monthly bill to $45.39 from $42.03. Water and sewer bills are issued every three months.

Over the next five years, county residents could see the typical quarterly bill rise to $180 from $135, or an increase of 33 percent. More fee hikes are expected after the 2014 budget.

“We want to keep our rates as low as possible,” said Mayor Carlos Gimenez, who characterized the increase as necessary. Last year, Gimenez’s budget projected a 9 percent hike for the 2014 budget.

Commissioners last month approved a major agreement with the federal and state governments to settle the county’s violations of environmental laws. The settlement, called a consent decree, requires Miami-Dade to commit $1.6 billion over the next 15 years to upgrade its sewer system.

Had the county not signed the agreement with the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, those agencies could have imposed steeper penalties on Miami-Dade.

Commissioners were less than happy about having to impose the fee hike. They blamed past commissions for not investing in the aging system and said the improvements could be put off no longer.

“There’s a trend here: Don’t do anything,” Commissioner Esteban “Steve” Bovo said of his predecessors. “Sooner or later somebody will sue you and force you to do it.”

“It’s distasteful,” he said of the hike. “I get it. But let’s move forward already.”

Emilio Azoy, who represents unionized workers at the water and sewer department, praised commissioners for swallowing the bitter fee-hike pill.

“For years, we have not had the resources we need” to maintain the pipes, he said before his statement was cut short due to board-imposed speaking time limits. “Rates have been held low for political reasons.”

The board voted 12-1 for the increase, with Chairwoman Rebeca Sosa, Vice Chairwoman Lynda Bell, Bovo and Commissioners Bruno Barreiro, Jose “Pepe” Diaz, Audrey Edmonson, Sally Heyman, Barbara Jordan, Jean Monestime, Dennis Moss, Xavier Suarez and Juan C. Zapata voting in favor.

Commissioner Javier Souto voted against. “It concerns me because in my community there’s a lot of poor people, too,” he said.

Water and sewer department administrators said fees for low-volume users who use less than 3,740 gallons of water a month would remain unchanged.