Warren Has a Plan for Your Drinking Water—but It’s Risky

Private utilities have a better record on health. Naturally, she wants to put them out of business

Seth M. Siegel. He is author of “Troubled Water: What’s Wrong With What We Drink.” Excerpts:

"academic studies consistently show that for-profit companies do a better job than government entities at removing contaminants from drinking water, as concluded last year in a report from the National Academy of Sciences.

One key reason for this is that there are too many drinking-water utilities. It would be logical to have a few hundred of them to handle water distribution throughout the country. Instead, the U.S. has about 50,000 water suppliers, many times the combined number of electricity and gas utilities. This amounts to more than 16 water utilities for every U.S. county."

"Such an unwieldy number of utilities leads to inefficiency and waste. Far worse, it has a direct effect on public health. The smaller the drinking-water utility, the greater the likelihood that it lacks the funds needed to hire highly skilled engineers, buy new treatment equipment, and replace aging infrastructure. Government companies are nearly 30% more likely than their private counterparts to incur violations of the Safe Drinking Water Act, according to a 2016 study in the American Journal of Political Science. Many of these violations go on for years, subjecting millions to water with unsafe levels of contaminants.

There are a few reasons for the disparity. Private water companies are subject to a layer of regulatory oversight from state public utility commissions from which municipal utilities are ordinarily exempt. When violations are found, regulators are often reluctant to hit small municipalities with fines, and are quicker to punish violations of private operators. That fear of a financial penalty encourages private companies to be vigilant."

"Fears of price gouging by private water companies are overblown, as state utility commissions have the authority to set rates."