WHAT'S WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE?

National Public Radio suggests there's an affordable water crisis along the shores of the Great Lakes.

In cities across the country, the cost of water has spiked in recent years, forcing hundreds of thousands of people to perilously endure weeks or even months without an essential resource.

The crisis is especially acute where you would least expect it – the Great Lakes, the region of the country with the most abundant fresh water.

A nine-month investigation by APM Reports examined the cost of water in six large cities near the Great Lakes – Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee, Detroit, Buffalo and Duluth – over the past 10 years and found that rates have risen alarmingly fast.

I can throw all sorts of social science penalty flags on this reporting, or is it crisis mongering. I submit, though, that one diagram and one anecdote will suffice to make my point.

Hit this link to see the diagram.  Neither National Public Radio nor American Public Media Reports could be bothered to make a shareable image of it.  That's unfortunate, as it would be useful to see Chicago's average annual water bill rise from around $273 for a household of four in 2010 to $576 in 2018, while Phoenix hovers at around $400 a year over the full decade.

Yes.  Phoenix.  As in Arizona.  As in Sonoran Desert.  As in piping water from the Grand Canyon.  Something strikes me as unsustainable there.

The water utilities of the big cities around the Great Lakes (the chart omits Milwaukee, perhaps the sewer socialists did more than pray to Our Lady of Infrastructure) have been raising their rates in order to renew the mains, some of which are going on 200 years old, and more than a few of which are lead pipes.  Those rate increases, however, are pinching the budgets of poor people.  Here's how public radio propagates its Narrative.

Many cities have been forced to raise rates to deal with decrepit infrastructure – leaking, cracking water pipes that in some places date to the 19^th century. With the federal government allocating less money for water infrastructure, most cities have foisted the bill on to their customers, especially those who can least afford it.

The APM Reports investigation found that the rising cost of water has hit poor families the hardest; the government-run water utilities in these six cities have issued at least 367,740 shut-off notices in the past decade. And an analysis of shut-off data revealed disproportionately high concentrations of water shut-offs in poorer areas and in majority black and Latino neighborhoods in every city.

"Washington austerity: women and minorities hardest hit." Wait until they look at the federal money involved in those Arizona pipelines making the lower rates for flood-irrigated golf courses possible.

Sometimes, the people who have their city water turned off turn to eighteenth-century approaches to making do.

[Chicago pensioner, Rev. Falicia] Campbell's basic tasks like doing the dishes or getting ready to leave the house became expensive and arduous. To bathe each morning, she had to pour gallons of bottled water into a pot to heat on a stove. She then carried the water up the steep stairs to the second floor and dumped it into the bath tub. She made the trip multiple times until she had enough water to take a bath. Then she'd use the water for the toilet. By the time she was on her way to her church, she was already exhausted. And there was a financial burden too: She was having to spend $20 a week on bottled water.

"There's an old saying you never miss your water until the well runs dry. And I found that out. It's very difficult to get around without water," Campbell said one day last October. By then, her water was back on. With the help of friends and family, it had taken her a month to come up with the deposit demanded by the Chicago water department. She's enrolled in a $120.93 monthly plan. If she's lucky, she'll pay off her debt by September 2021.

There's got to be a political economy problem in here: $121 a month for current and past use of city water, $80-90 a month for bottled water.  Why?

Phoenix, on the other hand, appears to have already established a reserve for maintenance and replacement, although if that reserve is relying on federal money, they, too, might be facing future problems.

Phoenix Water Services Director Kathryn Sorensen said the cost of water is determined not by a city's proximity to water but by the quality of its infrastructure.

Phoenix gets its water from the Colorado River, about 200 miles away. It's piped to the city through the Central Arizona Project, built by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation between 1973 and 1994. The project was for the most part federally funded, but there's a repayment plan in place.

"We're not like a natural gas utility or an electrical utility where you can move the product easily over thin wires or in relatively inexpensive pipes," Sorensen said. "You need concrete, steel, iron, and so the cost of a water utility is in its infrastructure, and the trap that a lot of utilities fall into is that they get behind in the rehabilitation and replacement of that infrastructure."

In the case of the big cities around the Lakes, that appears to have been the case.  The water utilities, however, were not returning calls from reporters.

As far as those "relatively inexpensive" electric and natural gas grids, don't get me started.  Cold Spring Shops pays more in transmission and distribution charges, and taxes, this being Illinois, than it does for therms and kilowatt-hours.