Put down the bottled water and get ready to pay a lot more
March 29, 2010

The US Conference of Mayors is out with a report saying they expect municipal water and wastewater charges to double or even quadruple over the next 20 years, as municipalities struggle to catch up with years of neglected maintenance and reinvestment in our safe water infrastructure. The report suggests that cities have become ill-equipped to keep up with the need to spend more to keep the water mains and sewer lines in top working condition. While it will always be difficult to raise rates without encountering an unpleasant public outcry, there's really not much choice: The Federal government is running trillion-dollar annual deficits, so its future capacity to subsidize this kind of work is looking worse all the time. While public complaints about rate increases may be loud and unpleasant, the simple truth is that people who have grown accustomed to paying $16 a gallon for bottled water (which, by the way, is almost always municipal tap water from somewhere) really don't have much to complain about when they pay $0.004 per gallon for tap water.

Let us know if we can help: We serve the full spectrum of municipal drinking water and wastewater equipment needs for Iowa and Nebraska.

March 2010
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last revised March 2010