Pittsburgh’s Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, for example, has agreed to eliminate dozens of “outfalls” that discharge sewage mixed with storm water directly into rivers and streams. The project could cost about $3 billion over the next 20 years.
“We’re not alone,” Arletta Scott Williams, executive director at Pittsburgh’s wastewater treatment plant on the Ohio River, told homeowners attending a town hall meeting last fall. “It is nationwide. There’s nowhere near enough money, and there’s no pot where it’s going to come from.”
Ratepayers certainly will be asked to help foot much of the bill.
In Louisville, residential sewer rates jumped 30% last year to help finance an $800 million sewer renovation program that won’t be completed until 2024.
“We don’t have any recourse,” Louisville resident Roseanne Southard said as officials prepared to approve the increase. “These agencies all want more money, and I’m not making any more.”
The nation’s public wastewater treatment plants and sewage collection systems need about $350 billion to $500 billion over the next 20 years for repairs and expansion, according to estimates from the National Association of Clean Water Agencies. The trade group based the estimates on figures from the EPA and other federal agencies.
This year, the federal government has budgeted $687 million for wastewater improvement, according to the National Association of Clean Water Agencies.
Everything seems to be going up in price, faster than wages. My sewer bill here in suburban Pittsburgh, for the exact same usage, jumped from $58 in 2006 to $106 in 2008, nearly a 100% increase. Now I can afford an extra $50 but not when everything else is going up as well…
Clean water or raising taxes. Hm. Why is this a difficult decision?
Perhaps if we had been paying taxes for our infrastructure all along (rather than, say, paying taxes to bomb Iraq), Anonymous might not have to worry about his $50 for clean water.
#2 – Gawain, the reason we are squeezed has very little to do with discretionary spending (like Iraq or food stamps or ag subsidies). The problem is the ponzi scheme better known as Social Security and Medicare – they eat a larger and larger share of the overall budget every year and politicians of all stripes are too chicken (you know what) to do anything about it.
“The problem is the ponzi scheme better known as Social Security”
Whatever its faults, Social Security is not a Ponzi scheme—and the oft-repeated Ponzi smear is as false as Ponzi himself.
Pessimistic official scenarios for Social Security assume a large drop in immigration to the United States and rather modest productivity growth. But even under those scenarios, we could assure the soundness of the system by making relatively modest changes now, such as phasing in an increase in the retirement age—an increase amply justified by increases in longevity.
Social Security can be fixed, however much the purveyors of the Ponzi smear might want the system to fail.
By contrast, no Ponzi scheme can be or ever has been fixed. None. If you doubt that, take a true Ponzi scheme and explain how to fix it.
Medicare and social security are insurance systems. They are pools of protection that alleviate the misery of those who need it. They are cheap ways of protecting our society from the violence that selfishness and insecurity often bring. But, as far as being squeezed, i don’t mind caring for others via my taxes.
After all, someday I might need it myself. Of course, if you plunder it and / or decide not to fund it, then there will be problems.
Medicare and social security may be expensive, but they are generally cheaper than not having them at all – due to the costs of the unintended externalities that are clumsy for us to compute.
There is of course not even a remote connection between my sewer bill (not a tax) which I pay to the local waste water authority, a quasi-governmental agency, and how the federal government chooses to spend the tax money it collects. Unless the federal government takes over the thousands of municipal authorities there will never be such a connection. The simplistic attempt to connect clean water and Iraq as an either/or choice is absurd. And since the sewer bill is not a tax, everyone pays the same rate based on usage. While those with disposable income can afford the nuisance of an extra $50 it is more of a problem for poorer consumers who have no choice but to pay the bill or have the water cut off…
A real business — I mean a non-government-granted monopoly that serves customers who have a choice and which runs itself on actual bonafide best-practices — budgets in the costs of new product development and maintenance. They don’t allocate all of the budget to solely providing a specific service right now. They allocate their budget with numerous categories that will allow them to offer services without suddenly “discovering” that their entire system is ancient and therefore they must now charge their captive customers “extra” in order to make it up.
One sees the same thing with roads. The government agency responsible for roads in so many states — both creation and maintenance of those roads — spends all of their money on creation of the roads [because of the matching-federal-government road grants].
Then, when the roads complete fall apart, they announce an “unexpected and entirely unpredictable crisis” and issue a bond or some other “extra fee” to cover these “unexpected and shocking costs of road maintenance” despite the official line that our taxes that we paid out over the decades was all about “roads.” I could go on and on. The tax dollars we pay for so much of our “services” actually go for other things entirely — other agendas — than their stated or official purpose.
Then we must have a new tax or fee when the original category that our taxes were supposed to be supporting all along actually breaks catastrophically, in order to support that “crisis.”
The tax pot grows smaller – the high wages of part-time council persons grow larger. What do we really want – more salary increases or better roads and waste disposal systems. Another thing I hear is “we need more roads” Dadgum it: we can’t even take care of the roads we have.
Sarah [#9]: I agree about the disastrous political disconnect between building infrastructure (popular) and maintaining it (invisible). It’s akin to the political disconnect between reckless deficit-spending (gratifying and expedient) and balanced budgets (thankless). It’s also akin to federal bailouts of people who build their McMansions on sandbars.
Note that failure to maintain and reinvest extends well beyond the public sector. The Penn Central Railroad and Bethlehem Steel provide cautionary examples. So, more broadly, does the world-bestriding General Motors of the 1960s.