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Costs are going up for pure, clear water
Copyright ) 1997 Nando.net
Copyright ) 1997 Governing Magazine
(December 27, 1997 00:24 a.m. EST http://www.nando.net) - From crowded
cities to rural villages, from wealthy suburbs to ramshackle trailer
parks, an essential component for a livable community is clean drinking
water. And Americans everywhere take its availability for granted.
Maybe they shouldn't. Around the country, public officials are finding
it hard to live up to that trust. State and local agencies are facing
persistent financial and technical barriers to supplying safe drinking
water.
The nation's 55,000 community water systems need to spend $12.1 billion
to install or upgrade treatment plants, storage tanks and pipes just to
correct contamination problems that have already been identified. Over
the next two decades, according to a U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) survey released earlier this year, they'll need to invest
another $126.3 billion to replace aging infrastructure and comply with
the evolving standards set by federal regulators.
Congress set up $9.6 billion in state loan funds to help communities
finance badly needed drinking water improvements. But that money has to
be repaid, and homeowners and business owners are likely to rebel
against the higher water bills that both private and government-owned
utilities will have to charge to cover the compliance costs.
Although big-city and suburban systems will bear the largest percentage
of the costs, predominantly rural states will have a more difficult time
financing the improvements that isolated small-town water utilities will
be forced to undertake. Even in Vermont, a still-rural state whose
588,000 residents live amidst a green landscape of thick forests,
sparkling lakes and rushing mountain streams, "there are a lot of
stresses on our water," says Sandra Levine, a Conservation Law
Foundation attorney in Montpelier.
First enacted in 1974, the Safe Drinking Water Act empowered EPA to set
maximum contaminant levels for health-threatening microbes, chemicals
and other substances that could find their way into drinking water
systems.
Although Congress significantly altered the law in 1996 to give states
greater flexibility, there's no doubt that environmental group pressure
and public fears aroused by events such as Milwaukee's 1993 outbreak of
Cryptosporidium contamination will force municipal agencies and
privately owned water utilities to accept the burden of providing purer
water. Since 1993, Milwaukee has upgraded its system for filtering water
from Lake Michigan, and other major cities that rely on surface supplies
face hefty bills for installing or improving filtration systems.
Earlier this year, EPA filed a lawsuit to force New York City to build a
$533 million plant to start filtering water from its Croton Watershed
reservoir, the source of 10 percent of the city's consumption.
Boston, Los Angeles, Detroit, Omaha and Seattle are among other cities
that are likely to spend $100 million or more apiece on filtration
plants to comply with EPA's rule requiring that surface water be
treated. Over the next 20 years, EPA figures that the 800 largest
systems (those serving more than 50,000 people) will spend nearly $60
billion of the $138 billion required to keep water safe to drink.
That will be painful, but at least big-city systems can cover the costs
of treating water and monitoring for problems by spreading rate
increases across large numbers of customers. The thornier problem is
that more than 46,000 public water systems serve small towns, rural
subdivisions, trailer parks or resort developments with less than 3,300
people. As they've developed since 1986, "federal regulations
differentiate very little between large and small systems," Vermont's
Rutherford points out.
"It's very difficult for smaller systems to stay in compliance just with
the operating aspects, to say nothing about construction," Rutherford
says.
Smaller communities, therefore, have to jack up their rates
significantly to pay for sophisticated water quality tests and install
filtering devices to comply with drinking water standards. By EPA's
calculations, the smallest systems would have to spend an average of
$3,300 over the next 20 years for each household they serve. That's more
than triple the per-household cost for bigger systems, and double what
EPA calculates for each family in a medium-sized community.
Some rural communities would just as soon throw in the towel. The
Starksboro Water Co., a private utility owned by its customers, has been
supplying about 60 homes in Starksboro, Vt., with drinking water from a
Green Mountain spring since 1906. The firm has unsuccessfully petitioned
the state public service board for permission to go out of business
rather than comply with the Vermont Environmental Conservation
Department's requirements.
The agency figures the average Vermont household can afford to pay $375
a year for water, but Starksboro residents see no good reason to raise
rates that now average around $75 annually. "We've got good water now,"
contends Fenwick Espey, the company's president. "The state wants and
wants, but they don't have any money to want with. We don't either, so
we can't afford to keep going."
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