BY LESTER GRAHAM
BRIDGE MICHIGAN
It’s a chilly day, but the sky is clear and the sun makes it seem just a little warmer than it actually is in Akron, a small town near the crook of Michigan’s “Thumb.” The village is surrounded by two huge installations of wind turbines, which can be seen extending to the horizon no matter which way you look.
“Which way am I going,” I asked my passenger, Marvin Hasso, Jr., as we pulled away from the Akron Village Hall to take a look at the town’s water tower and wells.
Throughout the Great Lakes region and across the U.S., water systems are aging. In some communities, this means water bills that residents can’t afford or water that’s unsafe to drink. From shrinking cities and small towns to the comparatively thriving suburbs, the true cost of water has been deferred for decades. As the nation prepares to pour hundreds of billions of federal dollars into rescuing water systems, the Great Lakes News Collaborative investigates the true cost of water in Michigan.
“Well, I guess you want to see downtown this way,” said Hasso, the one-man Department of Public Works for the village. He’s had this job off and on for decades because Akron has struggled to keep staff.
It’s also struggled to pay for its infrastructure — especially its water system.
We turned a corner, and Hasso pointed at a small light-blue tower.
“The biggest issue is really the size. They would like you to have a day and a half’s worth of water. And we don’t even have a day’s worth of water in our tower,” Hasso said.
Having extra water comes in handy when there’s a fire in town. Because the tower is so small, the firefighters can only pull water from a fire hydrant for a short time. Any longer and the water pressure gets too low, then a boil water order has to be issued.
The fire department — where Hasso is chief — has a tanker truck to haul water to fires. Most rural communities have tanker trucks because houses and farms outside of town aren’t hooked up to a water system, so they don’t have fire hydrants. It’s common practice for other departments to send tanker trucks to assist neighboring communities.
Families use a lot more water now than they did three generations ago. Dishwashers and washing machines, more bathrooms, and more frequent baths and showers stretch the limits of the aging water system.
The water bills don’t meet the actual costs.
Ten years ago, the village asked the Michigan Rural Water Association to take a look at the system. The association told the Village Board it wasn’t charging customers enough. It needed to raise its water rates to better maintain the system. The Board did raise the price it billed customers, but not by as much as recommended. It just didn’t think residents could afford a bigger price hike. Akron’s median household income is $43,000 a year compared to the state’s median of nearly $60,000 a year.
“Too many small systems haven’t been charging accurate rates for longest time because city council, villages, township boards, you know, a lot of times some think they’re doing the right thing by not raising rates and in the long run that hurts them,” said Tim Neumann, executive director of the Michigan Rural Water Association.
His organization has worked with communities that have gone five, ten, even 15 years without raising water rates. Then they have major problems and the rates suddenly have to be raised, sometimes by 50 percent or more. Neumann said if those town leaders would have increased the price at just the rate of inflation, they would have had more money to deal with infrastructure problems before they became emergency repairs.
“There is a general lack of political will, certainly. Raising people’s water rates doesn’t get you reelected,” said Eric Oswald, director of the Drinking Water and Environmental Health Division of the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE).
There’s a fair amount of enthusiasm lately among cities about money to fix some of Michigan’s water problems. The legislature and the governor approved nearly $2 billion in federal stimulus funds to improve aging water infrastructure. Michigan government leaders are also looking forward to the funds from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, more often called the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. As its name implies, that federal windfall is also to be used to repair, replace, or build infrastructure.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment indicates Michigan needed to spend $13 billion to fix its drinking water systems as of 2015. The new federal money won’t come close to that kind of money.
Some experts say part of the long-term solution for rural communities is working together. They say it makes sense for towns that are near each other to explore whether they can share equipment or consolidate systems to produce potentially better drinking water at a lower cost.
“You’d be amazed at how hard they push back against suggestions about cooperation and working together,” said Eric Oswald at EGLE.
