In Washington alone there is a pipe break every day, on average, and this weekend’s intense rains overwhelmed the city’s system, causing untreated sewage to flow into the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers.
State and federal studies indicate that thousands of water and sewer systems may be too old to function properly.
For decades, these systems — some built around the time of the Civil War — have been ignored by politicians and residents accustomed to paying almost nothing for water delivery and sewage removal. And so each year, hundreds of thousands of ruptures damage streets and homes and cause dangerous pollutants to seep into drinking water supplies.
Mr. Hawkins’s answer to such problems will not please a lot of citizens. Like many of his counterparts in cities like Detroit, Cincinnati, Atlanta and elsewhere, his job is partly to persuade the public to accept higher water rates, so that the utility can replace more antiquated pipes.
“People pay more for their cellphones and cable television than for water,” said Mr. Hawkins, who before taking over Washington’s water system ran environmental groups and attended Princeton and Harvard, where he never thought he would end up running a sewer system.
“You can go a day without a phone or TV,” he added. “You can’t go a day without water.”
But in many cities, residents have protested loudly when asked to pay more for water and sewer services. In Los Angeles, Indianapolis, Sacramento — and before Mr. Hawkins arrived, Washington — proposed rate increases have been scaled back or canceled after virulent ratepayer dissent. ...
At a meeting with board members last month, Mr. Hawkins pitched his radical solution. Clad in an agency uniform — his name on the breast and creases indicating it had been recently unfolded for the first time — Mr. Hawkins suggested raising water rates for the average resident by almost 17 percent, to about $60 a month per household. Over the coming six years, that rate would rise above $100.
With that additional money, Mr. Hawkins argued, the city could replace all of its pipes in 100 years. The previous budget would have replaced them in three centuries.
The board questioned him for hours. Others have attacked him for playing on false fears.
“This rate hike is outrageous,” said Jim Graham, a member of the city council. “Subway systems need repairs, and so do roads, but you don’t see fares or tolls skyrocketing. Providing inexpensive, reliable water is a fundamental obligation of government. If they can’t do that, they need to reform themselves, instead of just charging more.”
I posted this comment:
Charging the users of water in proportion to their usage is not the only
or best way to finance the maintenance of vital infrastucture.
One
of the reasons that city land is valuable and country land is less so
is that the former has access to extensive infrastructure. Were that
infrastructure to degrade and become unreliable, as some parts of the
infrastructure in Iraq have become unreliable or subpar, urban land
value would drop.
But there is a largely untapped resource which
we ought to be using far more of: the rental value of urban land. The
land under, say, Midtown Manhattan would become far less valuable if
there were not a reliable water supply. Yet most of the economic rent
on that land resides in the pockets of the landholders, rather than
being collected by the city for public purposes. Yes, this is
traditional. It is also dumb.
Leona Helmsley told the truth when
she told us that "WE don't pay taxes. The little people pay taxes."
We ought to be taxing our urban land value more heavily to finance all
the kinds of services which make that urban land so valuable.
We
rely on taxes on sales and on wages and on buildings at the expense of
having a healthy economy, and, as a byproduct, we get concentrated
income and concentrated wealth.
To learn more in the context of
another city, you might search on "Ricardo's Law" and "tax clawback
scam" for a short film on the subject.
We ought to be tapping the
economic rent on urban land to maintain our urban infrastructure.
That comment is #23; your "recommendation" could help keep it in the top 25 comments, which are more likely to get read. I also appreciated comment #49:
I wonder about those people who think government should be so small that you can drown it in a bathtub. Maybe they'll think differently when they're drowning in their own sewage.
and #62:
I wonder if the people who expect government to provide them clean water are the same people who want "less government." If you have a government that only protects the borders and conducts wars, I guess you're on your own to dig a water well and hope that the three million other people in your city who also have to dig wells don't pollute your water or use it up. Maybe you'll have to use your handgun to stop them. Of course, they have handguns, too. Call the police - no, wait, that also would be more government.
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