Small towns across the country are struggling to pay for federally required upgrades to sewage-treatment facilities because major employers have left town. In Buffalo, Mo., residents approved a $3.4 billion bond issue two years ago to comply with a federal order to upgrade the city's treatment plant with the expectation that its largest employer and biggest water user, Petit Jean Poultry, would pay back the bulk of the loan. But the factory shut down in October 2008, months before the upgrade was completed, leaving the community with the bulk of the bill and 500 fewer jobs to help pay it back, Peter Urban reports for Greenwire in The New York Times.
Many such towns are in similar binds; the cost of a wastewater treatment system varies little with the amount of water used, because the major costs are plant and personnel. "It costs as much, really, to treat a smaller amount as it does to treat a larger capacity," said Barbara Jones, interim city manager in Mount Airy, N.C., which in the last two years has increased water and sewer rates by more than a third and frozen capital improvements to make up lost revenues from a series of textile factory closings. "So much of it is fixed costs, including the bonds that were taken out just a few years prior to increase capacity."
Chris Hornback, senior director of regulatory affairs for the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, told Urban that factory closings typically hit smaller communities harder; in larger ones, more users can make up for lost revenue more easily. "Larger communities can spread the cost of these losses out during economic downswings; small communities are more likely to struggle," Hornback said. Federal support for local water systems has dropped dramatically since the 1980s, leading groups like NACWA to blast Congress for "authorizing a 'costly and increasing wave of mandates' while essentially abandoning any effort to provide 'meaningful financial assistance' to local governments," Urban writes. (Read more)
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