It's Not Just Flint

Cities like Pittsburgh need more federal help with giant water and sewer projects

All eyes are on Flint, where failure to properly treat river water corroded its aging water pipes, causing lead to leech into the water supply. Residents are still making do with bottled water while officials scramble to figure out a fix. Estimates are that it would cost up to $1.5 billion to replace the old water pipes.

The water crisis in Flint, though rooted in human error, has exposed the massive problem of aging, obsolete infrastructure facing American cities, particularly those with struggling, post-industrial economies. Many of these are served by aging, leaky water pipes — made not only with lead but, in some places, wood — where city officials have lapsed in upkeep.

Besides water infrastructure, another crisis is unfolding beneath our feet: Local governments are struggling to make critical, federally mandated upgrades to old sewer systems. The financial scale of those projects can be similar to that of Flint’s water infrastructure. Many of the cities expected to pay for these updates are likewise already struggling fiscally and economically.

When American cities first installed sewers in the 19th century, most of them built so-called “combined sewers.” That is, the unsanitary wastewater from buildings was combined with stormwater runoff from streets into a single pipe system. Later, treatment was added to clean the water before returning it to lakes and streams. But in the 772 cities with combined sewers, the capacity of the piping and treatment system can be overwhelmed during heavy rains, allowing untreated, though heavily diluted, wastewater to overflow into local waterways. These are called “combined sewer overflow” events, or CSOs.

The federal Clean Water Act requires these CSOs to be substantially eliminated. The EPA has been undertaking enforcement actions, including lawsuits, against cities and sewer districts to force them to retrofit these systems.

As I document in my recent Manhattan Institute report, “Wasted: How to Fix America’s Sewers,” the cost of these CSO remediation projects is massive — staggering in some cases. In fact, in a number of cities it is by far the biggest capital program in the region.

The EPA estimates that just the 31 cities and sewer districts that have signed consent decrees to settle federal CSO lawsuits will have to pay $29 billion to remediate their sewers. This includes $4.7 billion in St. Louis, $3.3 billion in Cincinnati, $2.7 billion in Cleveland, $2.4 billion in Kansas City and $1.4 billion in Pittsburgh (with costs rising to an estimated $2 billion since the decree was signed).

In the past, the federal government made construction grants available to help localities pay for sewer projects. In recent years, however, these were all but eliminated in favor of loan programs.

This means that today the bulk of these costs are going to be paid by metro area residents in the form of higher sewer bills and taxes.

In many of these former rust-belt cities, economic reinvention after deindustrialization has failed to lift lower-income residents, and they are disproportionately affected by increased sewer bills, even if they receive a hardship discount. So these increases function as a regressive tax, often hitting communities that already are struggling.

If we truly want to help post-industrial cities, one good way to do this is to help them reduce their liabilities — and combined-sewer-overflow remediation is a good place to start.

Strategies could include helping these metro areas shift to newer, so-called “green infrastructure” when it is cheaper. Green infrastructure allows some stormwater to return to soils naturally without flowing into sewers in the first place. Philadelphia is the first city pursuing this on a large scale and the Pittsburgh region is now adopting this approach.

The EPA should also revisit its affordability guidelines to more specifically address the effect of sewer rates on lower-income households, not just median-income households as it does today. It should take a broader view of what makes a community economically and fiscally distressed as well.

Governments might also allow the flexibility to redirect existing forms of aid from things like new highways and real-estate boondoggles such as stadiums to sewers. Programs like these make little sense in shrinking cities, where the last thing that is needed is more infrastructure.

Additional money in the form of renewed federal and increased state aid would also be welcome. The scale of the liabilities facing many of the most struggling communities — sewer, water, streets, parks, buildings, pensions and debt — is simply beyond their ability to pay.

If we as a society have decided that eliminating combined sewer overflows is a critical national endeavor, the federal government should pay for the majority of it, rather than impose a massive unfunded mandate on some of America’s most struggling communities and low-income households.

This piece originally appeared in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

This piece originally appeared in Pittsburgh Post-Gazette