The only certainty about the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority is that it cannot survive in its current form. That’s a lead-pipe cinch.
It’s been a poorly managed nest of patronage jobs that the city helped suck dry. The city’s entitled to 600 million gallons of free water each year, but the authority never got around to properly metering the outflow in the 22 years since that deal was made.
Ponder that a second. In more than two decades, nobody thought it worthwhile to track the output to the principal customer
The city might be paying the authority another $3.5 million — about 3 percent of its operating budget — once it gets the proper tallies on its spickets. A quick fix there would be good news for the water users in neighboring communities such as Aspinwall, Millvale, Sharpsburg, Hampton, Shaler and Reserve, though city taxpayers and water drinkers will continue coughing up those millions one way or another.
All any PWSA customers want, in or out of the city, is “clean water and a bill they can afford to pay,” as state Auditor General Eugene DePasquale succinctly put it in his recent scathing audit. But years of mismanagement have left the authority reeling.
State legislation to put the PWSA under the oversight of the state Public Utility Commission awaits only Gov. Tom Wolf’s signature, and he’s expected to sign it. The PUC would then oversee the billing rates, and Mayor Bill Peduto said Monday he’s OK with that.
He’s not OK with state Rep. Dom Costa, D-Stanton Heights, suggesting another layer of oversight beyond the PUC, however. Mr. Costa has said he intends to introduce a bill that would create a state receivership that would oversee the authority in roughly the same way that Act 47 coordinators have looked over the city’s finances since 2004.
Mr. Peduto and those overseers agree the city should be allowed to exit that distressed status, what with the city workforce shrunk by 26 percent and the pension fund back on solid ground. The mayor doesn’t think anything beyond PUC oversight is needed for our water though.
Why is this different? Because the mayor fears that full state control would lead to privatization of this city asset, and he’s right to worry. As poorly run as the PWSA has been, it could easily get worse in the hands of people whose chief concern is the bottom line. Veolia Water, a company hired to manage the PWSA from July 2012 through December 2015, did such a poor job that Mr. DePasquale saw its profit motive getting in the way of its obligations to customers.
Councilwoman Deborah Gross also noted that Flint, Mich., was under state supervision when it started cutting costs by drawing water from the tainted Flint River. The water that flowed from taps thereafter eventually led to involuntary manslaughter charges against state and local officials.
This is what can happen when you put your water under the control of people who aren’t drinking it. Given that the legislative leaders in this state, generally speaking, don’t much like cities or even understand why anyone would want to live in one, city residents should be wary of giving them control of their water. It’s easy to see state appointees paying more attention to the bottom line than the end product.
Unlike some other difficulties that Pennsylvania cities have — such as an inability to wrest payments in lieu of taxes from the resident hospitals and universities — there is no way to blame the state for the sorry state of the PWSA. It’s entirely the fault of Pittsburgh. If the city doesn’t right its course, Mr. Peduto will have to answer for that in the next Democratic primary.
I wish I could say he’ll also have to answer in the general election, but the standard Pennsylvania Republican three-pronged message to cities — you’re all idiots; I’d never live there; why don’t you let us run it? — still needs work.
The General Assembly, generally preoccupied with not passing a budget on time, has no political reason to look out for Pennsylvania cities’ interests and should not be trusted to do so. We Pittsburghers may be in treacherous waters, but we’ll need to sink or swim on our own.
Brian O’Neill: boneill@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1947 or Twitter @brotheroneill
First Published: November 23, 2017, 5:15 a.m.