2 - Water - Manny Teodoro

Jackson Action 💻

A pricing strategy for safe, sustainable, affordable water Not to be confused with Action Jackson Last month JXN Water announced a simple and bold new strategy to finance sustainable, affordable water in Jackson, Mississippi.

Women, SNAP, and Bottled Water 💻

The gendered pattern of water consumption among federal food assistance participants My last post showed that there’s a gendered relationship between household income and bottled water consumption in the United States. For men, there

Women, Wages, and Bottled Water 💻

The gendered relationship between income and bottled water consumption Bottled water was something of a novelty in the U.S. back in the 1990s when I started working in the water sector. It was perceived

Variable Flow is Shocked. Shocked! 💻

Sometimes there’s a little to say about a lot of things. Welcome back to Variable Flow. i can haz clean river? Tribal ripple effects Since the late 1980s, tribal governments in the United States have

TAP Dance 💻

Lessons from six years of income-based water assistance in Philadelphia Six years ago, to great fanfare, Philadelphia Water launched a new approach to bill assistance for low-income water and sewer customers: the Tiered Assistance

Big Pipes, Little Pipes, and Bottles 💻

Customer perceptions of utility quality & premise plumbing both contribute to consumer choices about drinking water trustworthy tap? A central theme that emerges from The Profits of Distrust is that the choice to drink

Helping People Pay Their Sky-High Water Bills Is a SNAP 📰

Opinion published in Newsweek, 3/29/2023 Everything is more expensive these days—even tap water. U.S. water utility prices have been rising faster than general inflation, driven in large part by a need to replace and update

Variable Flow Gets Clawed Back 💻

Sometimes there’s a little to say about a lot of things. Welcome to Variable Flow.* coming for your COVID leftovers Congress giveth, Congress taketh away The debt ceiling drama that recently roiled D.C. culminated in

Pillars of Affordability💻

Strategic guidance for water sector leaders Over the past several months I’ve written a series advancing five pillars of affordability: broad principles to guide affordability policy for leaders of America’s water and sewer utilities.

Lien On Me 💻

The fifth pillar of affordability is Delinquency Management An epic battle of good & evil at the water meter This is the final in a series of posts outlining five pillars of affordability strategy

Lighten the Load 💻

It’s hard to ask for help. Utilities should make it easier. Paperwork can be burdensome Water and sewer affordability is a complicated challenge that demands a multifaceted solution; to meet that challenge, I’ve developed

PFASt takes 💻

Initial thoughts on EPA’s proposed PFAS standards This is a perfluorooctanesulfonic acid molecule. It's kind of cute! Almost. As regular readers of this blog are likely aware, this week EPA announced proposed Maximum Contaminant

Profits of Distrust at Seminary Co-op Bookstore 🎦

A conversation with Sabina Shaikh, University of Chicago The burgeoning bottled water industry presents a paradox: Why do people choose expensive, environmentally destructive bottled water, rather than cheaper, sustainable, and more rigorously regulated tap

Assistance program administration & distributional impacts 💻

A thought experiment and back-of-envelope illustration Water/sewer utility customer assistance programs (CAPs) don’t run themselves. When utilities use rate revenue to pay for CAPs, administrative costs can quickly eat into benefits that such programs

First, do no harm 💻

Administratively costly assistance programs can hurt more than they help perpetually stylish. timelessly true. Water and sewer affordability is a complicated challenge that demands a multifaceted solution; to meet that challenge, I’ve developed five

Towels, not tuxedos 💻

How much assistance should each customer get? When things get hot, coverage matters more than fit Customer assistance programs (CAPs) form the fourth pillar of affordability strategy. Previous posts described the first three pillars

Bill Assistance on Walden Pond 💻

The fourth pillar of affordability is income-qualified assistance Utility bills were very affordable in Thoreau's day! But then, he also died from tuberculosis. ...in which I lay out a framework for water utilities that

Broken politics, broken pipes 💻

Sustainable solutions for Jackson, Mississippi not a sustainable solution National attention is back on drinking water utilities, and once again for all the wrong reasons. As readers of this blog surely know by now,

The Profits of Distrust 📖

Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government Cambridge University Press, 2022 The choices people make about drinking water reveal deeper lessons about trust in government and civic life. The burgeoning

Of Bills and Balance Sheets 💻

The third pillar of affordability is Rate Design “Affordable” means different things in different contexts This post is the third in a series outlining five pillars of affordability strategy for water and sewer utilities.

The Donut Budget 💻

The second pillar of affordability is Efficiency One of these matters more than the other This post is the second in a series outlining five pillars of affordability strategy for water and sewer utilities. Together,

Defensive Spending 💻

The first pillar of affordability is Quality Gotta count the bottles and the bills So long as water and sewer services operate on a fee-for-service basis, ensuring that these critical services are affordable will

Frame Game 2: Back to the Data 💻

Gendered and partisan responses to proposed rate increases [An absurdly busy couple of months has kept me away from the blogosphere—sorry. Will try to get back into a regular groove now] Winning public support

Issue framing and public willingness to pay water & sewer rate increases 🎓

AWWA Water Science, March 2022 This study uses an embedded survey experiment to evaluate the effects of issue framing on willingness to pay water and sewer rate increases. Government-owned utilities require public support for

And Water for All 🎦

Ramiro Berardo, Director ...And Water For All is an educational documentary about water affordability in Ohio. The film aims to amplify the voices of those who work toward providing clean, affordable water for all.

The Frame Game 💻

The science of talking about water rate increases It’s not about the water tower—it’s about what’s inside Strictly from a value standpoint, it’s hard to imagine anything that provides more bang for the buck

The Revolution Will Not be Legislated 💻

Notes on the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Part III Water professionals of America, unite! Late last year Congress passed the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA), also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, authorizing

Reading the Tea Leaves 💻

Notes on the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Part II* The Infrastructure Investment & Jobs Act is 1,039 pages long. That’s a lot of tea. The Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA, better known as

Half a Cadillac 💻

Notes on the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, Part I No need for air conditioning In November President Biden signed the long-awaited $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) better known as the Bipartisan

The Sweet Spot 💻

How much consolidation is enough? June 2026 Update: For more recent, more detailed, more rigorous analysis of scale and water system performance, see "Right-sized: How Much Consolidation is Enough?" in Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next

SNAP H2O 💻

Better federal water bill assistance with this one weird trick Click here to read my op-ed on this topic in Newsweek. When Congress created a new $638 million federal Low Income Household Water Assistance

(Un)taxing the Tap 💻

How to stop taxing water It’s hard to know exactly how much money Americans are paying in taxes at the tap, but it’s a lot. Last time I described the variety of ways that

Environmental Federalism in Indian Country 🎓

Sovereignty, primacy & environmental protection Policy Studies Journal, May 2020 Mellie Haider, Manuel P. Teodoro The landmark American environmental laws of the 1970s originally made no mention of American Indian tribal lands, and subsequent

Stop Taxing Tap Water 💻

Collecting tax revenue through water bills hurts affordability & turns utilities into coercive agents of government Can you find the tax? They may not realize it, but tens of millions of Americans pay taxes

Game Changer 💻

California utility regulators lead the way with comprehensive affordability assessment Wonderboy was the star of the movie, but Savoy Special won the game Between a global pandemic and a presidential election, you might have missed