Sometimes there’s a little to say about a lot of things. Welcome back to Variable Flow.
dis water haz teh icky plastiks
Microplastics: bottle vs. tap
In a stunning development, it turns out that water packaged, shipped, stored, and sold in plastic bottles tends to collect microplastics along the way. Researchers have detected microplastics in bottled drinking water for a long time (here’s a good recent review).
But a recently published study using new detection technology found an average of 110,000-370,000 plastic particles in every liter of bottled water.
Happily, a wave of recent studies also finds that tap water sourced from modern treatment plants has far lower levels of microplastics than bottled water. That’s important news for tap water enthusiasts, public health champions, and affordability advocates. A raft of research has clearly established that bottled water consumption in the U.S. is greatest among the poor and working class—especially low-income women—driven mainly by concerns about water quality and safety. Getting low-income households off the bottle would improve health, environmental quality, and affordability. Utilities ought to take the microplastics fight to the bottled water industry, which profits from distrust at the tap.
Leveling the regulatory playing field would help. To that end, a proposed California law (SB 1147) would create a new testing and reporting regime for microplastics in both tap and bottled water. That’s smart consumer protection. Hopefully the bill passes and the California effect is, well, in effect.
NYC revives its water tax
New York City is about to charge its own Department of Environmental Protection $1.4 billion in rent on the city’s water and sewer systems. That’s right, the city will lease its infrastructure to its own utilities for hundreds of millions of dollars a year. In turn, DEP will raise customer rates by 8.5% to cover the “rent.”
I raized teh ded taxez
New York City used that, um, creative funding mechanism for decades until it ended the practice in 2016. Facing mounting budgetary pressures, Mayor Eric Adams ordered DEP to revive the practice starting next month.
The move will cost single family residential customers in the Big Apple an average of about $93 a year, and will drive rents up for rich and poor alike—with no benefit to the water and sewer systems. Critics rightly decry the financial sleight-of-hand as a hidden tax on water.
As I’ve observed before, such hidden taxes on tap water are astonishingly widespread across the United States. Sometimes those taxes are transparent to customers, but more often they’re hidden deep in utility budgets and balance sheets. Whatever form they take, tap water taxes are regressive and hurt affordability. They also weaken utilities’ ability to raise the revenue that they need for infrastructure and operations.
Eliminating water taxes remains perhaps the simplest, most effective method of improving affordability for these essential services. Water sector organizations and community activists ought to make this a central plank of their affordability advocacy.Meanwhile in the Badger State
don’t tax teh water
Here in Wisconsin, tap water taxes take the form of Payments In Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) from city water utilities to the city general funds. Wisconsin water utilities send an average of 15%—and in some cases more than half—of their revenue to city hall as PILOT. These taxes are invisible to customers…
…until they’re not.Water PILOT took center stage in this spring’s mayoral election in Wausau. The city recently raised rates in order to pay for treatment plant upgrades needed to address PFAS contamination. With increased rates came increased scrutiny of the utility’s finances. Picking up on an Op-Ed I wrote back in 2021, a Wausau city councilmember proposed phasing out water PILOT to cushion the financial blow from the rates.
That proposal failed, but the issue re-emerged in this spring’s Wausau mayoral election. Challenger Doug Diny made eliminating water PILOT a central issue in his campaign. The issue drove uncommonly high turnout. In a startling upset, Diny defeated incumbent Mayor Katie Rosenberg, who had been a rising star in Wisconsin politics.
Voters apparently dislike water taxes as much as I do.
Main break blues
Major water main breaks and accompanying boil water notices disrupted life and grabbed headlines in Atlanta, Arlington, and Calgary over the past month. They’re just the latest, most prominent examples of trends across the United States and Canada. Lead service lines, PFAS, and cybersecurity get more attention, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that aging distribution systems are the American drinking water utilities' greatest challenge.
i can haz boil water notice?
Main breaks cause immediate health and environmental hazards, they shut down businesses, they endanger operator safety, and they drive consumers to bottled water. Main breaks also undermine trust in tap water well after the crisis is over. Check out this analysis of US Water Alliance survey data:
Regression analysis of 2021 VOW survey with controls for gender, race, and partisanship.
Main replacement programs aren’t exciting and they don’t win engineering prizes, but they probably do more for public health and public confidence than just about anything else. We gotta get the basics right, y’all.
The people have spoken
moar pipes!
Main replacements are apparently popular, too! The City of St. Louis was awarded $250 million as part of a settlement with the Rams when the team decamped for Los Angeles. Seeking input on how to spend that windfall, the St. Louis Board of Aldermen asked its residents to rank their priorities with an online poll.
Respondents could choose from 20 alternatives and were allowed to vote for more than one. More than 12,400 people responded.
Replacing the city’s aging water mains came out as the clear winner, garnering nearly 10,000 votes. It’s pretty exciting that water infrastructure prevailed in a rare plebiscite on city spending priorities. The survey was purely advisory, as the Board of Aldermen maintains authority over the use of the Rams settlement. Their decision is due by June 30.
Etc.
AMWA and AWWA challenge EPA’s new PFAS rule in federal court. Notably absent from the challengers is the NAWC. \\ Privatization likely to accelerate with new PFAS rule. \\ Indiana American water raises rates, but adopts inclined block rates with explicit goal of protecting affordability for basic service. Progressive pricing: not just for conservation anymore! \\ Cruelly and unusually, the well serving a Florida prison has very high PFAS concentrations—a reminder that many prisons operate their own water systems, but probably shouldn’t.