Water Foresight Podcast
Examining the future of water through the lens of strategic foresight--anticipating, framing, and shaping your preferred future.
Water Foresight Podcast
The Madison Declaration and the Future of Water (Part 3)
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Imagine turning on your tap and wondering: Is this water safe? Despite living in one of the world's most developed nations, millions of Americans question their drinking water daily. Why? As our returning panel of water experts reveals, it might partly be because the very reports designed to build confidence are actually undermining trust.
Dr. Manny Teodoro, Dr. Katherine Sorensen, and Dr. Chad Seidel continue their illuminating discussion of the Madison Declaration, focusing on transparency and justice in water systems. They explain how Consumer Confidence Reports—mandated by federal law—often confuse rather than clarify, using technical jargon that leaves customers more concerned than before. Dr. Sorensen shares a revealing anecdote from her time with Phoenix Water Services: whenever these reports were distributed, their call centers would brace for an influx of worried customers.
The conversation delves into what meaningful transparency should look like. Rather than just listing contaminant levels, shouldn't utilities share information about infrastructure conditions, financial sustainability, water loss rates, and planned improvements? The panel explores promising initiatives in states like Wisconsin, California, and Texas that are developing more comprehensive reporting frameworks.
Their most powerful insights emerge when discussing water justice. Systems serving disadvantaged communities frequently fail for decades without meaningful intervention. The experts dissect how political reluctance to raise water rates—often justified as "protecting affordability"—ironically leads to the most unaffordable outcome: system failure that forces residents to purchase expensive bottled water. As Dr. Teodoro powerfully states, "There's nothing so unaffordable as a failing drinking water system."
Looking toward the future, the panel sees reason for cautious optimism. Economic forces may drive improvements as industries like data centers demand reliable water before investing in communities. But true progress requires courageous leadership at all levels—people willing to make tough decisions because they're the right decisions.
Whether you're a water professional, concerned citizen, or policy maker, this episode offers crucial insights into how we might transform our relationship with America's most essential resource. Listen now to understand why transparent, just water systems matter to everyone—and what we can do to build them.
#water #WaterForesight #strategicforesight #foresight #futures @Aqualaurus
Episode Introduction
Speaker 1Aqualaris. This is the Water Foresight Podcast powered by the Aqualaris Group, where we anticipate, frame and shape the future of water through strategic foresight. Welcome to the Water Foresight Podcast. Today's guests return to the Water Foresight Podcast and include Dr Manny Teodoro, dr Katherine Sorensen and Dr Chad Siddell. Welcome to the Water Force Site Podcast. All right, manny, katherine Chad, welcome back to the Water Force Site Podcast. We continue our discussion of the Madison Declaration. Today I'd like to talk about two main issues, one being the opacity or transparency issue, and then let's move to the notion of justice or injustice in the world of water. So my first question is what do we mean by the issue of transparency or opacity in the world of water? Manny, what are your broad thoughts about that?
Speaker 2Where do we take that Sure Great to be with you again, matt. Opacity is one of those fancy words we professors like. It just means the opposite of transparent. It means the opposite of opaque. But what we're really getting at here is that the American public very poorly understands these critical systems that keep them alive. They don't understand tap water quality. They don't understand the alive. They don't understand tap water quality. They don't understand the infrastructure, they don't understand the regulatory processes or the institutions that govern water, own and operate water systems. And the reason that becomes a problem is because it you know, there's a lot of problems and it just hurts people's trust.
Consumer Confidence Reports: A Failed Tool
Speaker 2Now, congress knew that that was a problem. It already emerged as a problem by the 1990s and in the 1996 Safe Drinking Water Act amendments Congress moved by introducing this thing called the Consumer Confidence Report Rule. By introducing this thing called the Consumer Confidence Report Rule, it required every water utility to report on its water quality at least once a year. And the idea here was to improve the public's understanding of tap water quality and therefore to increase trust and trustworthy systems and maybe shine a light on systems that weren't doing so well. But I think it's fair to say that, both in experience and a fair bit of empirical, peer-reviewed data, that consumer confidence rule did not work and in fact, may actually make things worse. There's some evidence that those CCRs make people less trusting of their water. So by opacity we're really talking about people's lack of understanding and by transparency we're really talking about trying to improve that, trying to get the public to understand their water systems and their water quality more thoroughly and effectively, and their water quality more thoroughly and effectively.
Speaker 1Are you suggesting that and I'll throw this to you, catherine but is Manny suggesting that the Consumer Confidence Report really is very narrowly focused on a technical issue my drinking water quality but maybe not on other aspects where in the future we need to think about building trust with between water utilities and the customers? What about the leadership? What about the financial aspects?
Speaker 3things like that is that where there's probably a disconnect oh for sure, and you know, one of the problems is that, you know, the EPA very closely mandates what must appear in the Consumer Competence Report and, honestly, by the time you get through listing all the things that are mandated there's it's already too long and there's just no room for a utility to start talking about some of those aspects, even if it wanted to.
Speaker 3And I can tell you, yeah, they don't work. Well. We, you know, obviously the city of Phoenix, delivers basically the same water, same water quality, year round. You know, with some minimal variations due to source and other factors, it's basically the same water. But sure enough, you know, when it came time to send out the consumer confidence report, we would have to give alerts to our customer call centers because of the inundation of calls that they would receive with sudden concerns about the quality of their drinking water, when you know this document was originally intended to do exactly the opposite, in the lay people's fear. So, yeah, it's not a good form, it does not work well.
Speaker 1It seems to be I'll use the word in arrears. By the time I open my mail or the email and I get this consumer confidence report, chad, it's like I've already consumed the water and then imagine, not everybody is a toxicologist or an epidemiologist and they see HAA5. I may understand what lead is, but some of these things I don't understand. And then, as Catherine points out, I got to call customer service and say what does it mean? And maybe you as Chad, as an engineer, you like this report because it doesn't have a section called capital projects that are being distributed to engineering firms to build point.
Speaker 1Are there other features of this notion of opacity or transparency that you would like to see? Or maybe I don't want to put you in a funny spot, but as an engineering professional, what are the things should we be putting into this? We can call it whatever we want to, but in the future, what are the things should we report on? And to Catherine's point, with technology, I got to believe there's somebody out there, probably at ACE, in a booth that's doing this kind of reporting, real time, right, and I can look on my computer, my cell phone and say, oh, this is what the price of water is the rates went up today, or this is the status of a capital project, or you name it right. Am I by myself on that, chad, or am I singing a tune that you recognize?
Speaker 4You're hitting on all the critical issues that Manny tried to initially describe about the opacity of the water utility community and its customers. The consumer confidence report, while intended to help improve transparency of what is in the water, doesn't often meet that expectation because, you said Matt, it's too late and sometimes it's not frequent enough, and it is overburdened by a lot of technical aspects that don't answer what customers really want to know Is my water safe? And so, because it struggles to communicate whether the water is safe or not, rather than the checkbox of is my water compliant or not, it just dies on the vine. In terms of communication, there are great examples of water utilities although they are fewer than a majority that do a good job of routinely communicating how they're doing to meet the expectations of providing safe water. They do an even better job by communicating what they're doing to make sure their water is reliable, and the real best ones do a good job of communicating how they're making it affordable and the investments they're making to achieve that. So the CCRs have a poorly defined minimum floor expectation about what water utilities have to communicate, and the vast majority of utilities just check the box by using really draconian black and white letters that say all the bad stuff that's in your water and what it would mean for you if you drank this water every day for 70 years, and that is what we think needs to change.
Speaker 4As a unique example, epa just finalized revisions to the Consumer Competence Rule recently. In the proposal they actually suggested that it should be not possible to use the word safe in describing water, provided that it meets the Safe Drinking Water Act expectations, which kind of shows you how off the rails the conversation is about CCRs these days. But at least it improves things in terms of the frequency. But it's kind of forcing people into a bad place about how to push this really jargon filled language about things that doesn't help people answer the question. So I hope that in the future we can do some of the proactive things Water utilities communicate. It's safe. This is what we're doing to invest. This is what it takes to achieve those objectives. This is the value you get out of it and you know Manny, with his report cards, for example, that we've talked about before, is a great step in that direction, and others can follow.
Improving Water System Transparency
Speaker 2Yeah, I'm glad Chad brought up the revisions to the Consumer Confidence Report rule that came up last year. About a year ago EPA issued new rules on this and I wish I shared Chad's optimism, at least on the frequency point. But I fear what they did was order larger utilities to do a stupid thing more frequently, which is to issue these very poorly designed, poorly conceived consumer confidence reports. But do it more often and let's use scarier language in it and let's make sure we translate this bad document into lots of languages.
Speaker 3And let's not use the word safe, yeah.
Speaker 2Right, the Consumer Conference Report is a great tragedy because it was so well motivated and it is so badly needed, like better customer information, and then we just did it so poorly. And then in this rule revision I'm going to go off on this for just a second here, because if you look at the revised rule, there's absolutely no reference to the voluminous research on how to communicate risk effectively. This is something that we there's a lot of things in the social sciences that are hard to do. This is one that we can do really, really well. There's a whole field of risk communication out there. There's a whole bunch of people who study the psychology of risk, how people process information about risky things. The EPA didn't engage any of that research. All they did was, as I said, take the existing kinds of forms and say that we should do it more often and we should do it bigger and we should do it louder. It's just profoundly bad.
Speaker 2And then, speaking to the earlier point, or points that we touched on in earlier episodes, there's a different rule now. Under the new CCR rule, we have different frequency rules for utilities that serve 10,000 populations of 10,000 and up, and then we have the existing rule, more or less for the smaller systems. So once again we've got a regulator moving the goal posts for the large systems and leaving the small systems behind, and I recognize that that is well-intentioned, but effectively what our regulatory regime has said is customers of small systems don't deserve the same information that customers of large systems get. So, on all kinds of levels, I think the CCR rule was just a terrible missed opportunity and, as Catherine's story suggests, it certainly isn't doing a lot of good and it's probably doing a lot of harm.
Speaker 1It seems like I found my new three-person rule-writing team here, but you know a couple things. Let's go into a lightning round here. I'm going to challenge you A couple questions here. In the future, 10 years from now, is this called the Consumer Confidence Report or the Utility Confidence Report, or something else?
Speaker 3Yeah, that's a really great question. I mean, I would hope it at least resembles more of a utility confidence report and that it includes really important aspects of utility operations that currently are not included, you know, such as, you know, reinvestment in aging infrastructure, the financial capacity of the utility, all of these other aspects cybersecurity right that are really, really important. And I would love it if Manny would actually talk about his report card effort, because I think that gets to a lot of these points and manages to summarize a huge amount of information in a way that's understandable and readable by people who are not utility professionals.
Speaker 1Well, that's good. My second question, which you partially answered, is 10 years from now, in these reports, whether they're called consumer confidence reports or something else, what else might be, should be, could be reported on these reports, whether they're on paper or electronic, what are their features?
Speaker 2Well, I'll talk about some of the things, matt, that we're doing in the Wisconsin Water Works Excellence Project, which is this effort to develop report cards for the utilities in Wisconsin. Some very obvious things that I think consumers ought to know is some basic information about distribution transmission system conditions. How many main breaks do we repair every year? What's our water loss rate? You don't have to be a PhD in engineering to understand that losing 40% of the water you put in the system is bad L losing 5% is better. So the information like that financial sustainability people should know if their utilities are operating on a financial knife's edge or if they've got good, robust financial reserves, having affordability indicators that are meaningful to put in context the bills that people are receiving.
Speaker 2I think all this information is valuable. I think aesthetics is something that we need to take way more seriously, because our customers take that seriously. So putting that aesthetic information available to people as well. So I'd say, yeah, something more comprehensive. I'm not sure that that's something we can bite off in the Safe Drinking Water Act. I think that's something that the industry needs, that's something that drinking water consumers need, but I'd be very skeptical about an EPA or state regulatory body taking on a reporting regime like this, because I just have a feeling it would turn into a political hornet's nest.
Speaker 1However, would turn into a political hornet's nest. However, the information should be available to people. Yeah, I agree with that. Well, chad, what about to Manny's point? Maybe this is not something in 10 or 20 years that the federal government does through the Safe Drinking Water Act. But what about states? They tend to be the incubators of innovation. What about a more progressive state that we might think of, like Massachusetts or California? They could certainly take some of these ideas and put them into a state-level consumer confidence report or utility confidence report, whatever it is, and take some of these things that the three of you have mentioned financial issues, cyber capital expenditures, main breaks, non-revenue water, things like that. What do you think about that? Chad? Is that a 10 or 20-year possibility?
Speaker 4Well it's being done right now. There are a few examples of how states are attempting to bring together attributes beyond just water quality, but starting with water quality and meeting expectations of SAFE what the economic conditions are of systems being able to sustain themselves. What their economic conditions are of systems being able to sustain themselves, what their reliability is, to be able to have water supplies that will endure the changes that we're seeing with how water comes into our systems. So California is one of them.
Speaker 4Texas just yesterday the governor signed a bill for the funding that's going to move forward a similar effort, not so much for the needs assessment but rather the funding mechanisms to invest in water systems because they recognize the economic importance of that. So states are very much a place where this is happening. We need more states to pick that up and move that forward because, like Manny said, this isn't really within the jurisdiction of the Safe Drink Water Act or the Environmental Protection Agency. Parts of it are. And the last thing, though, that I think can make a huge difference, where EPA really does need to step up and accomplish its mission and objective is making the data available. I recall a meeting more than 20 years ago that talked about how EPA gets all of the data for compliance purposes, receives it electronically and could inform all of the underlying information in consumer confidence reports on an ongoing basis and for 20 years. That still hasn't been accomplished with the modernization of the safe drinking water information system.
Speaker 4That's a whole nother episode or series to talk about the failures of how it's 2025 now and we can't just look at our smartphone and know what the water quality is in the water system that serves my tap here in my office. But it's going to take partnerships to pull these things off.
The Future of Water Utility Reporting
Speaker 1Well, it's Chad's ripping the bandaid off. I don't think your friends at EPA are going to call you. But a couple of things. Let me be fair, because Chad raises some issues. I think you are right. I will use the foresight term. Signals of change. Okay, and Chad has done a good job of recognizing that. I think there are signals of change and I'm willing to be wrong, but for many years, Chad.
Speaker 1First of all, we have utilities across the board, big and small, public and private reporting, environmental compliance information electronically to EPA. Where does that go? Is that being provided back to consumers? Is it on the website? Is it not so? That's one issue.
Speaker 1Number two, let's remember our friends in the private utility world, where they have to do annual reports and they send them to commissions and there's things in there about how many miles of feet of Maine do you have? Who are your leaders? What's your budget? What's your capital projects? What's your non-revenue water? I mean you mentioned that, but many, many states have, either with private utilities or just across the board, have said we're going to focus on non-revenue waters.
Speaker 1Manny pointed out losing 40% of your water is not a good statistic, right? And so there are these to the larger point of consumer confidence, utility confidence. There are some of these efforts underway in a very piecemeal fashion across America and ultimately, in 10 to 20 years, will we see this come together in a more comprehensive, maybe to Manny's report card? Will there be a single point of reference for the multifaceted picture that these utilities provide to the public, and will it be available on the internet on a moment's notice? And maybe, dare I say, in 20 years, will it be near real-time information? Right, and so I just throw that out there.
Speaker 3I think you'll see a drive towards that and I think you'll see a drive towards best practices in. You know the type of information that needs to be included, how best to communicate that information. You know, as mentioned, many states are already experimenting with this, but I agree that it's probably not well done at the federal level. And for all that, many of the challenges utilities face are commonly shared across the country Aging infrastructure, affordability, cybersecurity, supply chains, water quality issues, all of those things. There are also aspects that do differ. Obviously, in the arid west, we have concerns about drought, and so one of the important things for people to know in my region is hey, does your local utility have a drought management plan? Does your local utility have an assured water supply? Some of those issues do vary from region to region, so I think it is best handled at the state level, but I think you'll see a drive towards best practices really interesting efforts underway.
Speaker 2We've talked about mine in Wisconsin, but there are good interesting efforts underway in California, in Louisiana, in New Jersey. They're very different approaches, but they are all trying to get after the same phenomenon, which is, try to improve the information available to the public and take advantage of the data that are relevant. And Catherine is absolutely right the principal issues that we deal with in Wisconsin are not the same ones that she deals with in Arizona. We have some of the same things, but some of them are very different. And so, yeah, having these things handled at the state level makes a lot of sense, and I love that. A thousand flowers seem to be blooming across the country.
Speaker 1So let me frame this Over the next 20 years. Do you sense that it will be leadership over legislation? Is that a way to frame it?
Speaker 4Well, if I go to the way that we've tried to highlight one of the most significant changes that needs to happen, it's about water systems coming together, whether you want to call it regionalization, consolidation, takeover, whatever the case might be, the fact that we just have so many water systems and the smallest ones struggle the most to achieve these objectives of sharing information.
Speaker 4The largest do a great job of it, and so, if you look at some of the investor-owned utility models, some of them already have the most real-time, most comprehensive information of water quality and things beyond that to indicate what they're doing, because it's in their best interest for their business model to demonstrate to their customers that they're achieving what they set out to do and fulfilling those promises. I tend to think if we can achieve the objectives of further consolidating water systems whether it's in an investor or a co-op or other mechanisms that are out there these outcomes will happen, because with the integration of more systems comes the need to better manage your information. It's more readily available, to share brings people to the same common point and that we've seen that happen over the last 20 years. Just need more of it in the next.
From Top-Down to Bottom-Up Solutions
Speaker 3Yeah, I would add that that there is also another driver for the in terms of the audience for this information, that that I think might lead to, you know, a flowering of best practices, and that is that industry more and more looks to these systems to determine whether the community is a safe place to invest. Data centers are a great example of this. Data centers use a huge amount of water when they come into a community, and there's controversy about what they do. But when they come into a community, they want to know, you know, what is the condition of the water utility? Are deliveries reliable? What's the quality of the water? All of these things really matter to them, and data centers aren't the only industries for whom this matters. So I think there are many drivers out there that will lead us to communicate this information in much more effective ways.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 2And it's exciting that the industry's woken up to this issue. I think now people get it. You go to the big water sector conferences. Now people get it right. You go to the big water sector conferences. There are whole, not just panels, there are now whole themes, lines of presentations that are just about communicating with the public. The industry has woken up to this issue and there's a lot of people doing really interesting work on communication. What we need to do is capture you know I'm a scholar right, I would say we need to do science around this stuff.
Speaker 1Let's use science to figure out what works and disseminate those best practices that Catherine was talking about, if not probable, that in the next 20 years we are seeing individual utilities, leaders within certain utilities, begin to recognize many of these issues around transparency and opacity that we've discussed, and it seems to me and I think Chad hit on this that they may not be waiting for a top-down solution or a comprehensive solution and that leaders themselves, within their utilities or at the state level are beginning to make changes to address some of these transparency issues. And in the next 20 years we may be sitting here seeing the fruits of this labor and that instead of as Manny pointed out at the beginning, the wonderfully clear consumer confidence report that is not at all confusing, may become something much, much different that addresses many of the challenges that we've seen over the past 50 years that we can use as a springboard to see some transformation over the next 20 years.
Speaker 3Is that fair? I hope so. But here's the thing it's really important to keep in mind that, for all of these best practices may flower and utilities find. You know much better ways to communicate with their public If they are still mandated to put out. You know the CCR in its current form. It's like you know you're trying to build trust at the same time you're then knocking it back down, so you really got to address both.
Speaker 1Implied within my narrative a minute ago is over the next 20 years, will we see an inversion of how safe drinking water is deployed in America, where, instead of having top-down solutions, perhaps for the past 50 years, now over the next 20 years, it will be bottom-up, be moving EPA or even state governments to make changes based upon the leadership that we find throughout these utilities that you guys interact with every day. Instead of, well, here's the one solution, let's get it out to 50 states. It's now here's 55,000 utilities that are doing things, and this is what it needs to be. This is what the new requirement needs to be. Please take this and adopt it. I think, mandy, you were talking about that. This is what the EPA might need to do differently. Instead of them telling you what to do, the utility leadership comes together over the next 20 years and says this is what needs to be put into a rule to level the playing field.
Speaker 1And, as Catherine pointed out, economic development measures are going to drive some of these things. We want to put a data center, we want to put an auto manufacturing plant, we want to put a chip manufacturing plant in your community, but you don't have any water and it's not reliable, your leadership is terrible, your rates are too low. On and on and on, fix these things. And so a governor, a mayor, may say we've got to fix this. If we're going to bring a thousand jobs into town, we've got to have reliable water systems right. We have to have not just consumer confidence but the confidence of society in what we're doing. Is that a 20-year picture that I'm painting that resonates with you, or I'm willing to be wrong?
Speaker 2Yeah, no, I think that's right. We're hoping it's 10, 20, 30, 50 years that the vision we're trying to articulate and, for my part, I think you're right, matt, that a lot of what we need is going to be bottom-up, local leadership, state-level leadership, and that will then eventually drive national leadership. The thing that I worry about, so my great hope, is that we've got great leaders and that they'll emerge and tackle the problems. We're already seeing that happen. The great concern here, the great worry, is that we will see greater and greater disparity between the utilities that are performing very well and the ones that are left behind.
Speaker 2And look, we even see this very well-intentioned neglect. We just talked about it with the CCR rule earlier. Epa just declared yeah, utilities that serve fewer than 10,000 people, eh, they can just keep doing the CCR the way they currently are. They just came right out and said it Small systems can't keep up.
Speaker 1They haven't read any of your papers, have they?
Speaker 2Well, no, they have a lot of issues. One of the things I do know is they've read my papers, but maybe nobody else has, but they have. Look, this is the thing that the place where we need federal leadership, the, where where the federal role really belongs, is in in um, in keeping everyone at sort of a, at a baseline right, like ensuring that the, that every place you go in america you turn on that tap and you can be confident in it. That's why we have a federal state safe drinking water act. This is one of the, it's the prime reason we've got a federal law on what is a principally local uh, local service. So, yeah, I mean the, the, the. The great hope is that we have terrific leaders. The great fear is that the disparities are going to grow if we're not careful, and we've got to have federal leadership to keep to keep those disparities under control.
Justice in the World of Water
Speaker 1Yeah, Well, you're right. One of my earlier comments about the possibility of the future is that if it's from the bottom up, will we have these national disparities? Will one state be excelling at some of the issues that you raise and resolving them, and then other states are not, and then we have more of a Flint situation or Jackson situation in certain areas of the country, and that's not something I think people want. In the next 20 years, we want to be able to resolve challenges. As you pointed out, we have 50,000, chad right 50,000 community water systems about what? 22,000 wastewater systems across the country. How do we, to Manny's point, get them to where the three of you think we need to have these systems over the next 10, 20, 30 years, where they are all operating on a level playing field of expectations, financially, capital projects, you name it, customer service.
Speaker 1But there is this notion of justice and injustice. I've talked about this on the podcast with different people the rise of environmental justice in the world of water. How? Let me ask this first question what does justice mean in the world of water and who gets to decide right? Is it Manny? You know we just turned to Manny and you know this is a bit of an ethical, philosophical question that we don't often think about when we go to, you know, our water conferences, but we just sort of talk about it. What do we mean by justice in the world of water? Your thoughts?
Speaker 4Well, I'll start with just stating that I think it's unique that there are just a handful of states that have taken action to pass so-called human right to water acts and tried to answer that question of what does it mean? And, generally speaking, they get at the heart of an expectation that everybody should have access to safe, affordable and reliable water, but they define it in different ways and it still comes down to there are some places in this country where it is very difficult and costly to provide safe water reliably, which then means in parts of those communities it's not affordable. So then who else is there to pick up the tab? And I think that's a key part of it, because then you can get into the underlying conditions of well. Why is it more costly to have to do that there?
Speaker 4It might be because you're in the desert and there's just not enough water. It might be because you're in a place that's contaminated and it takes a lot of treatment to address it. It might be because you haven't invested in what it takes to have a reliable water supply for the last 50 years while your neighbors have. Should your neighbors pay for you to improve your system in that case? And there's some real challenging things to overcome there. But I think fundamentally our community can for the most part agree that people should at least have their daily needs with respect to water met for potable water uses. Now, that's not water in the grass outside, but it is for the fundamental purposes of having water to just have life and economic development in those communities.
Speaker 3And where this really gets tricky, I think, is on the affordability side, because affordability can mean so many different things to so many different people and in so many different communities. But I do think we need to contend with the fact that for the most part, you know, people are willing to pay far more for their cell phones, for internet, for cable, than they are for tap water, and that's a problem. But affordability, I think, is at the heart of all this, and Chad talked about that. The technology, the knowledge, the solutions exist to get water to every single person in this country, no matter how remote they might live from other people and communities. That issue is the expense and until we confront the heart of that, I think it will be very difficult to confront this issue holistically.
Speaker 2I think I would frame things slightly differently when it comes to environmental justice and drinking water generally, but safe drinking water act in particular. The sort of classic canonical definition of environmental justice comes from Robert Bullard, very famous scholar, sort of pioneered this work decades ago and he described environmental justice as the principle that all people and communities are entitled to equal protection of environmental and public health laws. And I think what we're seeing quite clearly in the evidence, in the data and in the anecdotes that we all know is that certain systems do not receive the equal protection of environmental and public health laws. You mentioned Jackson, mississippi, a little bit earlier, Matt. That's such a perfect example because Jackson was in more or less ongoing noncompliance with both the Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act since the early 1980s at least.
Speaker 2So we're talking about decades before the recent disaster I think in 2021,. So we're talking about decades before the recent disaster, I think in 2021, where they had a deep freeze that caused a systemic collapse. Well, that's just the most well-known example. The truth is that there are systems all over the country that fail perpetually, where those communities are not receiving the full protection of the Safe Drinking Water Act. We've talked about those in prior episodes. They tend to be smaller systems, they tend to be rural. They also tend to be predominantly lower income and disproportionately non-white and Hispanic communities that suffer these failures. So a lot of that's technical managerial financial capacity issues we've been talking about before, but a lot of it is simply failure to implement the law.
Speaker 1It's an ongoing tolerance of failure by the to the people who we, as society, are putting into positions of leadership and authority to address many of the issues that you all have raised, thinking about the next 10, 20, 30 years.
Speaker 3I think they're really intertwined and you know, manny and I have written about this, but you know, one of the problems that we see is that you know what makes sense in terms of the financial viability of a community water system and, in turn, then its adequacy in terms of all of these aspects of running a community water system, is that you incrementally raise rates, you know, in small segments, but very consistently over time. Right, because the cost of things increase, and instead what we see are elected officials that really avoid increasing rates until they reach crisis conditions because they're concerned about being reelected, and that's so. That's both a financial problem and a leadership problem, and I see the two is very intertwined, and that that same case, you know, was at least part of the reason why Jackson ran into the problems it did right Is there's just this failure to reinvest that comes from a failure of leadership to, you know, have the courage to increase rates when you need to.
Speaker 2And there's a deep irony there, right, because there's nothing so unaffordable as a failing drinking water system or a failing wastewater system.
Leadership and Funding for Water Justice
Speaker 2The irony there is that, in the name of affordability, we're going to put off needed investments, we're not going to hire the operators we need, we're not going to adopt the treatment technology that we need, all in the name of affordability. That's going to end up driving our lowest income, most vulnerable customers to an astronomically more expensive commercial bottled water product. We know that. It's clear in the data the lowest income people and the non-white populations of this country are far more likely to drink bottled water because they don't trust their tap water systems. So again, we hold up affordability as this reason not to raise rates. I always, when I talk about affordability with people, I tell them the first the affordability always starts with quality, because the cheapest water you're going to get is the water that's coming out of the tap. You know, even at double its price, it's cheaper than buying cases of Aquafina for your family. So we've got to get over this idea that every rate increase is bad for affordability because the most unaffordable water is the failing water system.
Speaker 1It seems like you're articulating a version of an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure in the in a water context. Let's, let's let's not raise rates 1%, but maybe in the next three years we'll spend hundreds of millions of dollars fixing the problem. We could have avoided for a hundred thousand dollars that kind of where you're going.
Speaker 3You nailed it?
Speaker 1Yeah, how do you see this notion of justice arriving in 10 to 20 years? What, what will be? Where do you think we will be? Will we be in a transformation scenario where, wow, things are much different, for whatever reason, you know. Maybe it's it's different leaders taking different initiatives, or maybe there's federal solutions or state level solutions, but where are we going to be in 10 to 20 years with this notion of justice? Is it transformational? Is it just? You know we're going to be back on the podcast and it's business as usual, right? Manny's written another 20 papers and, um, you know we're all living in Arizona, there, near Catherine, uh, retired, you know what? Where is this? Um? Where do you think this is going to be in 20 years?
Speaker 2Matt, I think this is probably the area where leadership is going to play the biggest role. It's where it's going to require bold, visionary, creative, smart leadership to address these kinds of justice problems or these kind of injustices, and to bring us closer to justice. You know I'll talk about regulators, which you know we've been talking mostly about utility level, which is great, but regulators have really tolerated failure and they've done so in this very well-intentioned way. We talked about it earlier in the context of the CCR rule, but much more seriously are cases like Jackson, where regulators at state level, at the federal level, under Republicans, under Democrats, under every kind of leader, has seen fit to allow Jackson to fail, all under the guise of affordability and concerns about local control. Look, authorities have got to. Regulatory authorities have got to anticipate and prevent system failures and they've got to tackle Safe Drinking Water Act violations in a very serious and swift way.
Speaker 2You know Congress anticipated if you go back and look at the congressional record, 50 years ago, Congress anticipated that systems were going to struggle to meet these rules. What they never anticipated was that regulators would let them just fail over and over and over and over again. That is something Congress didn't imagine would happen. So, yes, it's going to require leadership, certainly at the state level, ideally at the national level. All it would really take is some leaders at the state level to say, listen, we're just not going to tolerate the failure anymore. We're just not. And it was disappointing to me last year, I don't know, it was a mild disappointment to me last year when EPA issued its restructuring rule, which was their polite way of saying the consolidation rule.
Speaker 2And I would interpret that rule as saying, hey, if systems fail badly enough for long enough, we can start a process where we will consider potential options for possibly someday consolidating. We're so worried about sensibilities over control that that no one thinks about the cost here. And the cost is failing water systems that every time that we we say, well, we don't want to impose thing, we don't want to impose things on anyone. Listen, the safe drinking water act is an imposition of of priorities. That's what a regulation is right. So if we're just saying, hey, we don't want to enforce this law because it might hurt people's feelings, well, we just shouldn't bother. Having the law is what I'm suggesting. So look, it's encouraging to me. The EPA is putting this rule out there. I was discouraged to see that it would take a Jackson-type failure over decades before any actual restructuring would occur. So yeah, it's going to require leadership. It's just going to require people who are willing to do the hard thing because it's the right thing.
Speaker 1I wish we probably wish that police officers would act like that if they pull you over for maybe going a little too fast, maybe not, and maybe we want you to be safe. But I'll let you go. You know things like that. But Chad your thoughts.
Speaker 4Yeah, it starts with states and water systems alike being willing to shine a light on their failures and their areas where they are likely to fail.
Speaker 4We're five years in now on what I view as the most comprehensive look at that with the California Safer Program and if you look at their 2025 needs assessment, which just came out, we had the pleasure of being a part of framing out how the first needs assessment was implemented five years ago, out how the first needs assessment was implemented five years ago, but over five years, they still now have 321 water systems on the failing list or off the failing list.
Speaker 4So they succeeded in getting 321 on. They have 390 still on the failing list, but they're predicting which water systems are moving from failing to failed. So they're starting to see ahead of what are the things leading to these systems that are going to need help and how much preventative medicine can we give them before we have to really address them in the emergency room. They can celebrate the fact that they've completed 170 consolidations of water systems. Now there's a lot more to be done, but it starts by being willing to shine a light on the problem and willing to step up and make the investments to solve them, because if you just walk away, everybody's going to end up in the emergency room and nobody's going to be able to walk away.
Building a Better Water Future
Speaker 1So the list is sort of saying metaphorically these are the systems that are pre-diabetic and if we don't address this boy, we're going to have a lot of problems down the road. So, each one of you, because you're smart and wise and leaders, if you were hired to be the general manager of a water utility, what's the one thing you would do immediately to help resolve the very issues you're seeing in the next 10 to 20 years? What would be the first thing you would do? Perhaps a great risk to your employment, but what would you do to live out your recommendations on day one? And let me give you an example.
Speaker 1You go to the mayor and say or recommendations on day one. And let me give you an example. You go to the mayor and say mayor, next month I need you to help me get the council to vote and move the water utility to an enterprise fund. We're going to be a standalone enterprise fund and we're going to have to raise rates incrementally 3% for the next five years, maybe 7%, who knows? But that's just one example. But what's the one thing you would do if you're talking to a leader about where the things need to be to begin to achieve, you know, your kind of vision for water utilities in 10 to 20 years?
Speaker 3nope, no, uh, no, no, uh, uh, no pressure you know, for me, and and this has been an area of concentration for a lot of my writings I think we have to make it okay to increase rates. I understand that that's politically very painful. I understand that it is also impactful and painful for those in our communities who have less than others. But, as Manny mentioned, if we don't do it, the alternative is just so much worse, and so I think we have to make increasing rates okay. In fact, I think we need to make it the thing that is expected, because it is responsible behavior from our elected leaders. We are not there today, but I'm optimistic that we can get there.
Speaker 4Yeah, it's kind of like saying we have to make it not okay if you don't raise rates, which is funny to say it as an engineer that wants to look at water quality and treatment solutions for contaminants. To answer your question, Matt, if I were in that role, the very first thing I would have to look at is what's the current financial position of the utility and if it isn't solvent, we're on a sustainable path. Go tell the members of the community immediately what it's going to take to get there and just don't hide from it. You know, if you're 10 years behind and you need significant rate increases to get on track, you got to tell people.
Speaker 4The corollary, which is interesting I see this more and more in the headlines lately in the housing market here is people that bought a condo, that have an HOA that isn't keeping up with reserves or investments to replace things. They can't sell their house now. Now that that's not the case with a water system, If you want to move into a community that's 10 years behind on investments for their water system, you don't have to disclose that to the people that buy the house in that community. But maybe that should be a part of the conversation going forward. So people raise the priority of what it takes to maintain people's safe, affordable and reliable water.
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah, water. So I'm going to. This is, even by my standards, an exceptionally bold claim, because Catherine's the only person on this call who's actually or among the three of us who's actually done this, you know led a major metropolitan water system. What the Madison Declaration says is that utilities and regulators must lavishly share information about drinking water in clear and understandable terms. So, in that role, that's what I would attempt to do. What does that look like? Well, what I'd probably do, very self-serving, matt, here, I'd call up Manny and I'd say Manny, can you send me a copy of your rubric that you're using there in Wisconsin?
Speaker 2Because I want to take and create a report card and I want to put it in front of our elected officials and show them where we're performing well and where we're performing not so well, and show the places where we have to improve and help. That demonstrate the places that we need to prioritize. That demonstrate the places that we need to prioritize. So I'm not just asking you for a rate increase because I want a bigger car or I want to send my kids to a private college. I want a rate increase because it's going to strengthen us, it's going to strengthen the infrastructure, it's going to reduce our water loss. It's going to increase our resiliency, it's going to protect us against contaminants, it's going to give us financial strength and security so that we can, whether the next pandemic or whatever other disaster comes along. So it's lavishly sharing that performance information in clear and understandable terms, so that elected officials, regulators and the general public can understand it.
Final Thoughts on Transparency
Speaker 1Yeah, I wonder out loud and this is another episode for another day I wonder how the rating agencies to Chad's comments. I wonder how the rating agencies Moody's, fitch, s&p influence this most immediate conversation on financial resiliency and transparency, most immediate conversation on financial resiliency and transparency. But I will just leave that hanging for another episode. Final thoughts 20 years from now. Where do you think this conversation will be? If you are optimistic so we won't talk to Manny, I'm kidding but if the three of you are cautiously optimistic about the future of water and we're talking about water systems in the future, from transparency, from this notion of justice, whoever decides what is just are we going to reach these notions of transparency and justice? Is it more of a path than a destination? But what's the one thing, optimistically, that you think we'll see in the next 20 years that maybe we're kind of raising as issues or we're griping about today? So put on your optimistic, your hat of optimism, and think of one thing in 20 years that we'll see that will be really rewarding to see.
Speaker 2Matt, I think we're all optimistic people. If we weren't, we wouldn't be part of the water. All three of us believe that these problems are soluble and that we can address them. Problems are soluble and that we can address them. I think. In direct answer to your question, I'm very hopeful and optimistic on the communication transparency front. The technology is there, the industry's woken up to these issues and there's a lot of really smart people working in this area that just weren't there 20 years ago. So I think in the decade ahead, this is, of all the things that are in the Madison Declaration, I think this is the one that we can tackle most readily and most quickly and could have a real long-term effect. Some of the other things are more like 40 or 50-year projects, but I think this is one that quickly.
Speaker 1Yeah.
Speaker 3I agree with that. I do think that people will have a much more holistic and meaningful understanding of the condition of their community water systems in the future.
Speaker 1Yeah, chad, you're bad and clean up here. What's your final thought? Don't struggle.
Speaker 4Yeah, I agree, the means and methods to get the information out there are there and I'll be honest, I think, while very much an optimist, I'm probably more of just a realist. I think the drivers for why this is going to change is less about the best leaders wanting to just do good, but the best leaders recognizing it's in the best interest of their organization, whether it's a municipal utility or a business utility or whatever the case might be. Communicating what you do for your customers and how it benefits them gets you the trust that allows you to do the work that you know you got to do in the first place. It's less about somebody telling you that you have to do it, but recognizing that doing it is better for you. Don't hide from it, put it out in the light, address the problems, tell people the successes and we can achieve that objective of safe and affordable and reliable for everybody.
Speaker 1Okay, okay. Well, manny, catherine and Chad, I want to thank you again for being guests today on the Water Force Site podcast. I'm going to invite you back for one more episode. We're going to wrap this up with more cautious optimism and talk about where things are going to be in the next 20 years. We're going to wrap this up. This has been an amazing series of episodes on the Madison Declaration. I'm learning a lot and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode of the Water Foresight Podcast. So thank you again for being guests today. Thank you, great to be with you, matt. Thank you, can't wait. All right, thank you, the listeners, for listening to the Water Foresight Podcast. We will see you on the next episode. Have a great day. Thank you for listening to the Water Foresight Podcast powered by the Aqualaris Group. For more information, please visit us at Aqualariscom or follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter.
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