How long can our water assets keep sweating?

Can we break the cycle of living beyond our means?

Continuing to run our water infrastructure into the ground without reinvesting to restore or replace these assets is like taking out one of those exotic interest-free mortgages without any plan on how to make the future high payments… For the majority of water systems where consumers continue to pay rates that do not factor in the depreciation of our water supply network, the end of this ‘interest free’ period is fast approaching!

Infrastructure 2010: Investment Imperative, a report recently released in April by the Urban Land Institute and Ernst & Young, warns that by continuing to under invest in our water infrastructure the U.S. is not only threatening its quality of life both now and in the future, but it is also compromising its ability to compete economically with the rest of the world. The concern about the ever increasing future cost of renewing our water infrastructure has been raised by the EPA for many years and largely fallen on deaf ears. Hopefully the suggestion in this report that the rest of the world is gaining ground on the U.S. and that we may be left behind economically will strike a chord with politicians and push this issue up the priority list amongst the more sexy topics of healthcare, financial reform and clean energy.

The report states that “water profligacy is an American way of life….where very few ratepayers are charged the full cost to provide water and subsequently households and businesses use water inefficiently, even in areas where demand could soon outstrip supply”. I was amazed when I moved to Denver from Melbourne in 2000, to see nature strips on the fringes of the outer suburbs being watered in summer, in the middle of the day, where there were no houses. In a City that is in a high desert and is precariously balanced in supplying adequate water for a fast growing population, I could not believe there were not dual flush toilets which have been mandatory in all new houses in Melbourne for years, a City with twice the annual rainfall of Denver…… and Infrastructure 2010 shows that 27% of a household’s high quality treated drinking water goes down the toilet.

So back to our deteriorating infrastructure assets - those assets that were paid for by our ancestors and are the foundation on which the US economic powerhouse has been built. Perhaps the present generation’s treatment of these assets can be likened to the children that inherited the family fortune without having to work hard like their parents to earn it. To a large extent, society today is conditioned by the media for instant gratification, to live for the present, take out a line of credit on the house to go on a vacation or buy a new car and a 50 inch flat screen TV. A few years ago I heard a story of a ratepayer complaining after an increase in his water bill that it was now costing him almost as much as his cable bill. That pretty much sums up the perceived value put on water. God forbid that it would cost anything near an essential service such as cable! Soon our tap water bill will be as much as our monthly expenditure at Starbucks……

Hopefully it does not take catastrophic failures of our water assets, a loss of water supply or widespread water related sickness to get the public and therefore the politicians to approve the necessary $300-400B* repair/upgrade bill to renew these assets and then accept being charged for the true cost of providing water. Unfortunately, history suggests that this will be the case. Even in Australia, it was an extended drought, severe water restrictions and rapidly increasing cost of water that led to the change in public attitude which resulted in a significant reduction in household water use and major infrastructure upgrades. So it looks like we will continue to live for today, gorging water at minimal personal cost while our water infrastructure sweats away out-of-sight, until sometime in the future when the infrastructure debt collector comes to our door….

*USEPA’s “2007 Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment”.