No, EPA did not propose affordability guidelines for municipal utilities
Affordability!
Late last week the EPA published in the Federal Register some proposed new guidelines for evaluating sewer utilities’ financial strength. In press releases and public comments, water sector and local government organizations lauded the proposal as an important action on “affordability,” and a few news outlets dutifully reported on the EPA’s new water "affordability" guidance. Likely most people would think that means lower water bills for low-income households.
But the EPA’s proposed guidelines have little to do with affordability as most of us think about that word—the guidelines are not about ensuring that low-income Americans can pay for water. Rather, the proposal is about whether communities have sufficient resources to pay for water pollution controls required under federal law. In practical terms, the new guidelines are about whether sewer utilities have to comply with the Clean Water Act in a timely manner.
Understanding what’s going on here requires understanding a bit about sewers, the Clean Water Act, and why utility managers think about “affordability” differently from the rest of us.
Clean Water Act and local economics
Municipal sewer systems must meet a variety of pollution control rules under the federal Clean Water Act. Many of these rules require major investments in infrastructure and ongoing operational and maintenance costs. Often these costs can be quite high, especially in older communities that operate combined sewers that suffer significant sewage overflows during rainstorms. Overflows can cause raw sewage to run into rivers, lakes, and coastal waters, with attendant damage to health and environmental quality. The Clean Water Act aims to reduce, mitigate, and eventually eliminate such pollution. Recognizing that pollution controls are expensive, Congress built into the law provisions that a allow sewer utility to delay compliance with water pollution controls if compliance would outstrip its “economic capability.”
Yuck.
With few exceptions, sanitary sewer utilities in the U.S. are owned and operated by local governments. In practice, then, when sewer systems face significant Clean Water Act compliance costs, local officials sometimes try to negotiate delayed compliance with EPA or state environmental regulators by arguing that their communities have insufficient economic resources to comply with the law.
To evaluate these claims, EPA conducts a Financial Capability Assessment (FCA)—an appraisal of water pollution control costs relative to a community’s overall economic resources. This appraisal is supposed to be holistic, capturing a range of economic indicators. Since 1997, a key element of EPA’s assessment methodology has been the residential indicator, which is intended to reflect the impact of sewer system costs on rate payers. The residential indicator is the average sewer bill as a percentage of the community’s median household income (%MHI). When that value exceeds 2.0%, EPA considers pollution control costs to be “high” and potentially eligible for delayed compliance.
This approach isn’t great, but it’s not a crazy way to evaluate community-level financial capability.* Still, the residential indicator has been much-maligned in the water sector and was the subject of a comprehensive critique from the National Academy of Public Administration three years ago. Last year AWWA, WEF, and NACWA joined forces to advance a new analytical framework to guide FCA instead of %MHI. The AWWA/WEF/NACWA methodology incorporated local poverty levels and sought to evaluate Clean Water Act compliance costs in terms of their potential impacts on household sewer bills at the 20th percentile income.
What EPA is proposing
Still with me? Great. The proposal that EPA released last week is a revision to the FCA guidelines with two broad alternatives. Much of the proposal aligns wiht the methodology favored by AWWA/WEF/NACWA. Under the Alternative 1, EPA retains the traditional %MHI residential indicator and the suite of economic indicators in its existing methodology, but would add assessments of local poverty prevalence and potential rate impacts on 20th percentile income households. Alternative 2 would allow utilities to use a “dynamic financial and rate model” to evaluate the impacts of Clean Water Act compliance costs on customers.** At the heart of the new proposal are a pair of tables that integrate the old and new methodologies:
Alphabet soup
More alphabet soup
Recognizing the underlying distribution of economic conditions by accounting for poverty and 20th percentile incomes is an important advancement. Under either alternative, these guidelines are marked improvements on the status quo in that they provide a more complete, nuanced economic picture of the communities that sewer utilities serve.
Still, it’s important to keep the purpose of all this analysis in mind: under either alternative, the FCA would inform EPA’s negotiations with sewer utilities over compliance schedules. The point of these guidelines is to determine whether and how much sewer utilities ought to delay compliance with the Clean Water Act. Compared with current practices, the proposed guidelines are more flexible and could in some instances lead to more permissive regulation.
Financial Capability ≠ Affordability
EPA did not propose guidelines on affordability for low-income water or sewer customers. Under the proposal, EPA could consider low-income customer assistance programs (CAPs) as part of its overall assessment, but nothing in the proposed guidelines requires or even encourages CAPs. The proposed guidelines would not oblige utilities to structure rates in ways that constrain prices for conservative or low-income customers. Indeed, a utility that was looking for ways to delay investments would actually have an incentive to set more regressive prices: high fixed charges and declining block rates would make FCA metrics look worse, and so help justify compliance control delays.
So despite the rhetoric in headlines and press releases, these guidelines really aren’t about affordability in the way that most of us understand the term. Sure, delayed Clean Water Act compliance will reduce a sewer utility’s revenue needs. But EPA doesn’t regulate rates under the Clean Water Act, and so there’s no guarantee that financial savings from Clean Water Act noncompliance will accrue to low-income customers. In short, these guidelines are not about low-income affordability, they’re about utility finances and water pollution.
Don’t blame EPA for this confusion—they’ve been scrupulously clear and consistent that their guidelines are about financial capability. Regrettably, the industry press releases and news stories have been waving an affordability banner where it doesn’t quite belong.
Can communities afford clean water?
All this confusion over terminology invites reflection on what affordability really means. When municipal sewer utility leaders declare that they can’t “afford” to comply with the Clean Water Act, they’re making a political judgment that spending on other things or keeping taxes and service rates low is preferable to following water pollution rules. That is the prerogative of local policymakers. Communities need to pay for many important things, and clean water is just one of them. The democratic process is meant to help us sort out our collective priorities.
That’s why there’s more at stake here than pedantry. In expanding the meaning of “financial capability” to recognize the distribution of incomes in communities, these guidelines invite us to think about the distribution of environmental conditions in the same communities. The proposed guidelines don’t contemplate whether foregoing water pollution control in the name of “affordability” really helps or hurts low-income households. Do working class folks benefit when a city has low utility bills, but faces frequent and ongoing sewer overflows? Who suffers when raw sewage flows into rivers, lakes, and harbors because utilities can’t “afford” Clean Water Act compliance?
Using the right words compels us to confront these uncomfortable questions, and focuses our attention to what FCA guidelines mean where the sewage meets the street.
*%MHI is, however, terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad way to measure low-income household affordability.
**This alternative is going make rate consultants happy.