In Defense of Federal Water and Wastewater Spending (pdf)
There are few Americans who will be shocked to learn that the nation's drinking water and wastewater systems are rapidly detedorating due to aging. If you live in any city, such as Milwaukee, where the systems are more than 50 years old, you can expect costly repairs, replacements and upgrades. Like it or not, the costs are going to be passed onto you - the system user. In many older city and rural areas nationally, users are looking at 100 percent fee increases. You'll quickly forget $3 per gallon gas prices when your family is paying $1,000 per year for clean drinking water and treatment ofwastewater.
But is targeting the cost to individual system users fair? The projected cost of replacing these systems nationally is approximately $500 billion over the next 20 years. The annual U.S. federal contribution to this cause through Congress is about $850 million annually.
Improving drinking water and water quality - including Lake Michigan - should be a shared national cost rather than placing this burden on the users of a specific system. The recently introduced, bipartisan Clean Water Trust Fund Act would establish a $7.5 billion annual fund comparable to the Highway Trust Fund that would pool national resources to finance water and wastewater infrastucture projects.
The reality for most water and wastewater systems is that the existing federal pool of water and wastewater funding is hardly worth fighting for to control user fees. The nation would be better off with a dedicated souce of revenue that can protect consumers from paying excessive fees to drink clean water and swim in uncontaminated lake water. How Congress chooses to allocate these funds- through competitive agency grants or at the discretion of Members of Congress is open for future debate. But for now, consumers should let their congressional delegations know that more funding is needed to prevent a growing clean water crisis.
(The author is based in Broydrick & Associates' Washington, D.C. office and represents wastewater systems and other interests before the U.S. Congress)