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Deadly Waters
I’ve spent the morning trying to understand the chronology of Flint water crisis. From what I can tell, this seems to be an accurate and up-to-date account. But I’m sure some of you are following this more closely than I’ve been, so please tell me if any part of it is incorrect.
It seems to me that unless the ACLU actually forged that March 7, 2014, e-mail from Darnell Earley to the Detroit Water and Sewer Company, which I highly doubt, they’re correct: The claim that Detroit cut off Flint’s water supply is a lie. And obviously so.
The impression suggested by this entire story is one of profound, systemic incompetence. The Snyder Administration appears to have been derelict; the Flint City Council and Mayor Walling appear to have been derelict; the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality was useless, and so was the EPA.
But the idea that this could never happen to wealthy white people is nonsense. In fact, poisoned water stories are apt to become more and more common, because our drinking-water systems are now very old. According to the American Water Works Association,
A new kind of challenge is emerging in the United States, one that for many years was largely buried in our national consciousness. Now it can be buried no longer. Much of our drinking water infrastructure, the more than one million miles of pipes beneath our streets, is nearing the end of its useful life and approaching the age at which it needs to be replaced. Moreover, our shifting population brings significant growth to some areas of the country, requiring larger pipe networks to provide water service. As documented in this report, restoring existing water systems as they reach the end of their useful lives and expanding them to serve a growing population will cost at least $1 trillion over the next 25 years, if we are to maintain current levels of water service. Delaying the investment can result in degrading water service, increasing water service disruptions, and increasing expenditures for emergency repairs. Ultimately we will have to face the need to “catch up” with past deferred investments, and the more we delay the harder the job will be when the day of reckoning comes. …
Given its age, it comes as no surprise that a large proportion of US water infrastructure is approaching, or has already reached, the end of its useful life. The need to rebuild these pipe networks must come on top of other water investment needs, such as the need to replace water treatment plants and storage tanks, and investments needed to comply with standards for drinking water quality. They also come on top of wastewater and stormwater investment needs which — judging from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s (USEPA) most recent “gap analysis” — are likely to be as large as drinking water needs over the coming decades.
It’s just a fact: our water infrastructure wasn’t built to last forever.
Given this astonishing, bipartisan example of appalling incompetence in water management — and given that it’s primary season — I’d like to hear the candidates’ views about whether governments should hold monopolies on water provision.
If they think not, I’d like to hear their views about this question: Is water a natural monopoly?
What do you think?
Published in Domestic Policy, Economics
I agree, CARF is exactly like a Social Security trust fund, we know what the costs will be, we set up a mechanism to cover those costs, because we are financially responsible, BUT, as that fund grows, so does the temptation to use it for other immediate pet projects, or to further increase unplanned benefits, for short term political gain, and eventually they spend the fund, promising to replace it next year, “trust us – really this time we will”. Of course BIBDAYBD kicks in and to few of us want to care about the boring numbers anyway, so they get away with it, and we never hold them accountable or unelect the electable ones or impeach the appointed ones. Then when it all falls apart, we shoot the innocent, fix what has to be fixed, by still kicking whatever we can down the new road, already sowing the seeds for the next disaster, hopefully after we are gone.
It’s not a wholly unreasonable way of thinking, given how bad we are at predicting the future.
Within the past couple of weeks Dennis Prager interviewed the author of “Let There Be Water”
I haven’t read the book, but listened with interest. I live in a small town that has its own wells and just elected a mayor who promised to upgrade and fix the pipes, and going by all the construction I see, he’s fulfilling that promise. Meanwhile we watch a neighboring town shrivel up and die (the only green you see is from fake lawns), without its own water supply they have long bought their water from yet another town which has raised prices significantly
The author specifically mentioned Jerusalem as a city with a well run water system. He also mentioned that the technology is out there and there’s zero excuse for any town to suffer a water crisis, and that water policies are a perfect barometer for measuring the competence of your government.
When my sister had to get hers renewed, photo and all, they spelled her name wrong on her new license. She told the lady at the desk. The lady told her she couldn’t correct it because “It’s illegal to alter an official document.”
It’s illegal to be that lazy and stupid, unless one works for the government.
Claire,
Mr. S is a water/utilities dork. I have asked him to read your post and send feedback. Watch your inbox.
That’s certainly our intuition, isn’t it? It’s pretty much the synonym for backwardness: “Whatever you do, don’t drink the water.” (People forget that the idea of “drinkable water” is really recent in the history of human development. Until 1854, people had no idea why they kept getting swept away by cholera. I just discovered this. For anyone interested in the history of sewage — which is fascinating — this article in Scientific American is great.)
I’ll bet everyone wants to hear the answer! Can he be persuaded to join us?
He is tapping away as I write. Trust me, I have encouraged him to join many times over the years (I am a charter member Ricoteer). “Bye honey! I’m going to my Ricochet event.” His focus is elsewhere, but he does read everything I send him.
I like your thoughts, John Hansen. I have the same reservation as others in that politicians like money to give away and balance budgets. The shovel ready stimulus proved that. Here in Michigan we didn’t get a lot of projects, but Granholm balanced the budget.
Something I didn’t see anything on is if anyone called a Culligan man or similar to test their water, and if so, if the Culligan man might suspected something, especially if you took a good history of the water. For a long time it looks good, tastes good, then gets brown, etc. Wondering because I have a water system and I know they tell you what you water is like. There are also kits in Home Depot, I think.
Another important use is fire protection (which often dictates the sizing of pipes). I don’t think water conveyance and treatment for ag (or large industries) is a natural monopoly. As long as there is a source they can access (e.g. an aquifer or nearby surface water they have rights to), many will handle their water utilities in-house.
The water sellers in areas that are poorly served by a centralized system are a great example of the robustness of markets, in my view. Not as efficient as pipelines, but for high-value uses like drinking and cooking, obviously people are willing to pay more.
The way I see it, privatization gives local governments an easy out: someone to foot the bill for capital works, and to take the blame for raising rates (to where they should have been all along if the eventual replacement of buried infrastructure had been included in the operating budget).
Yep. Markets aren’t robust or weak — they just are. Human beings find ways to trade stuff they’ve got for stuff they need; always have, always will.
I just wonder if it makes any sense, big picture, to do this with water. If you add up what everyone in Istanbul pays for bottled water, does it come to a sum in excess of the price of pumping clean water into everyone’s home? That’s to say, if people act cooperatively, water-wise, do they individually end up with a better deal?
I have no idea what the answer to that question is. I’d love to hear from someone who’s really thought about the economics of this.
That’s what it looks like to me in France, superficially. (I haven’t studied this; it’s a casual impression). Major infrastructure work needed?
Government: Oh, the blessings of free markets and privatization.
Voter: Hey, if this is such a blessing, how come my water bill just went up 300 percent?
Government: Because if it was your tax bill, you’d vote us out of office.
Voter: Cruel neoliberalism and capitalism! Give us Marine Le Pen!
Update: I’m thinking better of this comment, because in truth, I have no idea. I’m not an expert on French water management. I’ve just noticed that people here get confused when the water bill goes up, and tend to blame it on a recent privatization, to which various officials or newspapers will respond that those complaining are confusing the effect of the costs of infrastructure renewal with the effects of privatization. I have no reason at all to think that privatization is a deliberate electoral strategy to avoid being held responsible for higher prices, save that it would be an obvious thing to do as an electoral strategy.
David Zetland has thought a lot about the economics of water. Here are his thoughts on Flint: http://www.aguanomics.com/2016/01/flint-michigan.html
Don’t know. It’s never been tried. ;^D
Philadelphia has long wanted to privatize its municipal natural gas system, Philadelphia Gas Works (PGW). PGW has similar issues with being able to invest in itself as needed to keep the system in shape while remaining within the city’s budget constraints from year to year (and if I may speculate, some very bad labor deals that have been struck over time, read work rules, retirement funding, etc.).
However, the city has been stymied because it wants to constrain potential buyers so that the new gas works runs more or less like the old one (which is partly a jobs program). So they have not gotten it done and PGW will continue on until I guess something big enough to attract notice occurs.
This is not to say there are all bad people at PGW or that they don’t do their jobs right. As far as I know (which is not far) they do.
Dealing with water is one thing. But with gas, something big enough to be noticed usually takes out a building or two.
One gripe Claire is with the artwork accompanying the post. I don’t doubt these are real samples of water, but I cannot believe that the sediment and opacity of the samples are due to the source of the water. I would bet a lot that the sediment comes from upsets in the pipes near the taps.
What would make me confident of this is that if this level of opacity would not be tolerated for 13 months by the average joe.
The dirty bottle of water was also used in PA as an accusation against fracking. It never had any merit in that the opacity was due to issues with water wells that happen from time to time.
Claire & all,
First, thanks for the link to natural monopolies. I wasn’t really very conscious of this bedrock economics. I’ll read and think for a while on it. However, this whole subject has jogged my deep deep semi-conscious memory. When I was an undergrad (it was the early stone age) I wrote what I called my fire department paper.
You see in the early 19th century there was no city water in most American cities. They had a bucket brigade to carry water from the well to the fire to put it out. In the Pittsburgh of 1845 most of the city was constructed out of wood (very cheap and available in frontier America). The inevitable fire occurred that year which devastated the center of the city. In response to this a city water system was installed not so much for the residents but to put out fires. Even more interesting was the fact that the fire engines weren’t owned by the city. Each fire insurance company had its own fire engine & engine house. If your neighbor’s building was burning and he had a different fire insurance company, you were never quite sure just what they’d do if your building got caught in the blaze. At the end of the 19th century, the city decided this wasn’t an optimum situation and bought all of the fire engines & engine houses. The Fire Department became municipal and has remained so ever since.
I guess this proves that what is and is not a natural monopoly can evolve, well, naturally. The other historical example that comes to mind of big government water were these guys.
They were very successful in a big way for a long while. Then chaos set in and they lost control. …..hmmm…wonder what happened?
Regards,
Jim
Coliform bacteria have been found in the tap water in parts of Flint. (E. coli testing is a general proxy for sewage contamination, which can mean other bacteria, viruses, and chemical contamination.) That suggests that the water mains leak, allowing ground water infiltration.
The water will be more heavily chlorinated to kill the bacteria… which changes the pH, and if that’s not properly dealt with, metal pipes start to dissolve faster, which can result in iron, copper and even lead contamination of the drinking water. That seems to have been the problem in the first place. If the pH is wrong for long enough it could even trash the plumbing – both household plumbing and the city pipes – in effect, causing the pipes to age faster.
Speaking of stupid, I went to Walmart a few years back to get a watch battery replaced. Like a lot of places they will install the battery for free if you buy from them. The watch had been losing time which was why I want to replace the battery. The nice young lady looked at the watch, battery in hand, and said, “It’s running.”
“I know”, I said. “But it’s losing time. So I want to try a new battery to see if that will ‘fix’ it.”
“Well, I can’t put a battery in it if it’s running.”, she said.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
So I asked her if she could sell me a battery and then I could put it in myself. She reluctantly agreed.
Now, see, the difference here is I could ‘fire’ her in terms of the battery installation or even go to another store to get a battery, options not available at the DMV. When we meet stupid there, we are stuck. We can ignore it, deal with it (wait times, other inconvenience, etc.) or take the favorite tack, just complain incessantly. But we can’t go down the street to a competitor. That’s a YUGHE reason to limit the scope of government.
You’re probably right — I was trying to find a “dirty-looking water” photo that wasn’t under copyright. There’s no reliable chain of custody on that photo, for sure.
December 29, 2015 letter from Governor Snyder’s own Flint Water Advisory Task Force (that included former GOP State Senate Majority Leader Ken Sikkema), was tough on the Michigan DEQ. Snyder leapt into action soon after this. Why didn’t he act sooner? I think he was told the tests were fine and perhaps that those complaining were alarmists or that the pipes to an individual home represented an outlier not representative of the system as a whole. Anyway, this is worth reading.
And to go a step beyond that, if the government is primarily supposed to handle a few big things, we can, collectively, fire them if they do it badly.
But what happens when you want to throw out the people mismanaging healthcare or education, but the alternative is clueless about national defense?
Claire & all,
Sometimes the same events can be interpreted very differently on basis of a very small difference. The claims of the left seem to surround the fact that Detroit didn’t cut off Flint’s water supply but “only ended a 50-year contract to renegotiate a new one”. Thus this rendition of the facts leaves the impression that Flint could simply opt to use the water from Detroit. The decision to use the Flint River as a water supply is transformed into a machiavellian scheme by the REPUBLICAN GOVERNOR to poison the sweet residents of Flint.
This is an incredibly convenient narrative for the lefties in Detroit and in Flint. I wasn’t there and I really don’t know but might I suggest a different interpretation:
The hopelessly mismanaged city of Detroit wanting to continue to maintain its ludicrous pension and public employee union wage standard while the city sinks only deeper into stagnation decided to use one of its few remaining assets to make a quick buck. They used the end of the Flint water contract to jack up Flint’s water bill huge! Flint, another democrat controlled economic basket case looked for a quick out. Using the Flint River sounded like a great idea to incompetent democrat political Flint functionaries no matter how many people told them that this was a disaster they refused to listen. They weren’t going to give up one nickel of public employee pension/health care/salaries even though the municipality which they were living from was dying like a host dying with its parasites attached.
The Republican Governor is at fault of course. He didn’t use the State Militia to invade Flint and stop the idiots from poisoning their own people.
Regards,
Jim
Sounds plausible. The DEQ sounds like every conservative stereotype of useless bureaucrats distilled into their concentrated essence, doesn’t it?
Well, you know, lead supposedly sweetens wine…. [g]
On OP, I don’t see a natural monopoly in most areas of the US, but an oligopoly of 2-4 companies (depending on actual water supply) might be workable. The Colorado River Compact is an example of states forming such a compact (with Congressional approval); although that one now wants adjustment.
It’s entirely likely that, with a very few exceptions, individual municipalities or the private enterprises that serve only a municipality are too small to function with today’s water demands.
Eric Hines