Todd McInturf/Detroit News via AP Photo
Detroit water shutoff protests, 2014. The city announced a shutoff moratorium during the pandemic, but some cities and towns plan to disconnect water for nonpayment.
Like many small towns in pandemic America, Duquesne, Pennsylvania, is at rock bottom. The mill city near Pittsburgh never regained its footing after the collapse of the steel industry. Its 6,000 residents, mostly poor and Black, have been left behind in jobs, education, and medical care. COVID-19 has brought with it more paralysis. Duquesne’s only grocery store has closed. There are no doctors with offices within the city limits. And now water bills, huge ones, have started going out to residents again after an early-spring pause.
After property taxes, water payments are a major source of revenue for Duquesne, so the city council recently voted to resume billing. The insult goes even deeper, as water quality has been poor in recent years; in 2018, Duquesne violated drinking water standards for disinfection by-products. Mayor Nickole Nesby started getting complaints about the resumption of billing. One young woman now faces a $300 bill on top of past charges. A senior citizen told her that the utility wanted her to put $150 toward her old bills. “That’s unreasonable because they’re on a fixed income,” Nesby says. They can’t really afford it.”
Clear across the country, Cynthia Koehler, executive director of WaterNow Alliance, a national advocacy group of municipal water leaders, serves on the board of her local water utility in Marin County, California, one of the country’s wealthiest communities. She has seen a “very significant spike” in people who pay late or not at all. The county is mostly white.
No one knows what Congress will do. What is certain is that Duquesne residents who don’t pay their bills will have their water turned off.
Water-sector advocates had hoped to secure relief for municipalities through the latest iteration of the Water Resources Development Act (WRDA). Passed every two years, the legislation helps fund the country’s port authorities and Army Corps of Engineers projects, like the dredging operations that keep navigation channels open for the maritime industry. This year, some members of Congress tried to add provisions to WRDA to address water infrastructure, drinking water, clean-water improvements, and COVID-19 relief issues, only to see them stripped from the bill.
Water infrastructure and quality concerns could be addressed through the reintroduction of bills like the WATER Act in the next Congress. But specific COVID-19 relief provisions for public water utilities or ratepayers will have difficulty making it into the bipartisan bill that is now on life support amid Republican resistance. Lack of relief for water utility customers could end up making life unimaginably worse, if that is possible in 2020, for millions of Americans.
Like public transportation, the public water sector relies on federal funding. But that funding has cratered in recent years. Congress has ignored nearly $1 trillion in deferred maintenance and expansion needed over the next 25 years in the drinking water sector, and more than $270 billion in wastewater improvements. The pandemic has only magnified these problems.
The national advocacy group Food and Water Watch has catalogued 584 active moratoria on water shutoffs, protecting 137 million people, or about 40 percent of all Americans. There are active moratoria in cities like Detroit and Philadelphia; but others like Cleveland will move forward with disconnections. At least 221 moratoria have expired, leaving 190 million people in all at risk for shutoffs. Only California, New Jersey, New York, Vermont, Virginia, Washington state, Wisconsin, and the District of Columbia have full shutoff moratoria.
In early November, the Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission lifted the moratorium on shutoffs that had been in place since March, while adding provisions to protect low-income residents. But those guidelines don’t help anyone who lives in Duquesne. Under Pennsylvania law, systems operated by municipalities, municipal authorities, and cooperatives are not defined as public utilities regulated by the state public utilities commission, so a locality like Duquesne is not subject to the commission’s orders.
The incoming Biden administration has expressed support for a national water shutoff moratorium. Both versions of the House-passed HEROES Act proposed a national moratorium on water service disconnection, reconnections for those who already lost service, and the waiving of late fees. The bills also added billions for a drinking water and wastewater assistance program to assist low-income consumers, similar to the LIHEAP program that helps low-income people pay heating bills. But these efforts at relief have run into the callous indifference of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
Those water shutoff moratorium provisions have not resurfaced in the current bipartisan plan now being negotiated in Congress. Unsurprisingly, industry pressure is the likely culprit. In a November 16 letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and McConnell, the American Water Works Association and other groups representing drinking water and wastewater utilities noted that 90 percent of utilities have already suspended shutoffs or late fees. “[Those] actions demonstrate that federal action to prevent water service disconnections via a moratorium is not necessary or advisable at this time.”
A national moratorium deprives the utilities of one tool to compel people to pay, says Rianna Eckel, a Food and Water Watch senior organizer. “It is an effective threat, to say if you don’t come up with this money, we are going to cut off your access to water,” she says. “People will try to find money because your home’s not livable without water.”
The water utilities also requested “local water and wastewater systems be made explicitly eligible to receive a portion of any state and local budgetary assistance that is included in future COVID-19 response legislation.” What is more likely is that cities and towns may get small, non-sector-specific relief packages that trickle to places like Duquesne and don’t make any appreciable difference in residents’ lives.
Handwashing is one simple way to fight COVID-19. That makes water shutoffs in places like Duquesne reprehensible. Mayor Nesby has advised people to reach out to local social service agencies like the United Way of Southwestern Pennsylvania for help to pay bills. Yet even those agencies are down to their last dollars of CARES Act funding.
No one knows what Congress will do. What is certain is that Duquesne residents who don’t pay their bills will have their water turned off. The mayor has recommended that residents get ten days’ notice before a shutoff; but she says that sometimes people never receive notices before disconnection. Shutoffs may force people, some who work in the Pittsburgh metro “eds and meds” hub, to move in with family and friends or pop over to neighbors’ homes and put more people at risk. Members of Congress are “out of touch,” Nesby says. “The problem is none of them have had to choose between eating and paying a water bill.”
