...And Water For All is an educational documentary about water affordability in Ohio. The film aims to amplify the voices of those who work toward providing clean, affordable water for all. Even though the movie is set in Ohio, many of its lessons will be relevant for those concerned with water affordability in other places.
This project was made possible by the support of the School of Environment and Natural Resources and the Ohio Water Resources Center at The Ohio State University.
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Transcript:
Bryan Stubbs
Water is the backbone, and clean water in particular, the backbone to any great society. You're not gonna have healthy humans without it, you're not gonna have a healthy economy without it, and you're not gonna have a healthy environment without it.
Manny Teodoro
Safe, reliable drinking water is, in many ways, the definition of development. The availability of sanitary sewer systems is a miracle of the modern era. We've eradicated waterborne diseases that ravaged civilization for centuries, and we've done it with these water and sewer systems that have become ubiquitous in our lifetimes.
Nicholas Breyfogle
The rapid industrialization and urbanization of the United States beginning in the late 19th century, posed a wide range of new challenges to ensuring water quality for Americans. By the mid-20th century, the federal government began to build on earlier local efforts to curb water pollution and created specific laws to further that goal. In 1948, US Congress passed the Water Pollution Control Act, the first policy entirely dedicated to improving water quality across the nation. But the act proved insufficient to bring meaningful changes and water quality continued to erode in the 1950s and 1960s.
Speaker 1
Why can't we get any decent drinking water in this town anymore?
Speaker 2
They shouldn't be allowed to dump all that crud in our trout stream.
Speaker 3
All we want is a place to swim near home.
Speaker 4
How can you expect me to stay in business here, if I can't even use this water in my plant?
Nicholas Breyfogle
In Ohio, water quality problems had long been evident. The Cuyahoga River, which runs through Cleveland and discharges into Lake Erie, was the historical poster child of poor water quality in the state.
Shane Patrone
In 1936, a spark from a blowtorch being used to dismantle a boat ignited floating waste, burning for five days. In 1969, another fire - and the Cuyahoga, a relative unknown, became an overnight sensation.
Nicholas Breyfogle
In fact, since 1868, the Cuyahoga caught fire in different sections more than a dozen times. The 1969 Fire was widely covered in the press and functioned as one of the catalysts for renewed efforts by the US Congress in the 1970s to finally improve water quality.
Speaker 6
The special Subcommittee on water pollution will be in order.
Manny Teodoro
The two primary pieces of federal legislation that govern the water and sewer sector are the Clean Water Act 1972, and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974. Those laws set water quality standards that utilities around the country are supposed to comply with. Administration of those laws is handled jointly by the US Department of Environmental Protection and by state agencies.
Nicholas Breyfogle
The Clean Water Act and the Safe Drinking Water Act greatly improved water quality in the US. They did so in two ways, first, by instituting tougher regulations to prevent pollution of waterways. And second, by giving financial incentives to local governments through federal grants, so that they could build and maintain state of the art wastewater and drinking water infrastructure. Federal financial support dropped significantly in the 1980s, but the regulatory requirements did not. As a result, state and local governments began to shoulder more and more of the financial burden needed to keep water cleaning technology up to date. By 2017, state and local governments were responsible for about 96% of water utility financing.
Speaker 7
In urban areas, wastewater flows into a sewer line, which carries it to a centralized sewage treatment plant. This expensive process of waste transportation and treatment requires heavy machinery, energy, and a trained personnel. In small towns, the cost per household is high.
Nicholas Breyfogle
As local communities began picking up the water tab, the costs of ensuring clean water access have ultimately been transferred on to local customers. Because cleaning water to high standards is not cheap, water and sewer bills have been rising to levels that exceed income growth for most families. Research published by the Bipartisan Policy Center shows that household income in the US grew 35% from 2000 to 2017, while the average rates for water and wastewater services increased by 136%. In Ohio, the trend is remarkably similar. The Ohio Environmental Protection Agency collects data from utilities and tracks changes in costs of water and sewer bills across the state. In its last report of these data released in December 2021, the Ohio EPA shows that, on average, sewer annual rate increases have clearly outpaced inflation since the early 1990s. This is also true for drinking water. An important thing to keep in mind is that this doesn't necessarily mean that water services are unaffordable. In fact, most Ohioans can pay for their water and sewer bill without facing significant financial challenges. Yet, for some, paying their bills on time can be a considerable burden. But what do people mean when they talk about water being affordable? The answer is not so simple.
Manny Teodoro
For most people in the general public and the way you and I would think about affordability, we're normally thinking of the household pocketbook - how much does a family have to pay? When folks in the water sector talk about affordability, sometimes what they're really thinking about is the price of the water system: the pipes, the treatment plant, the reservoirs, and the costs associated with meeting the regulatory requirements for providing those things.
Jerry Rouch
water and wastewater infrastructure in Ohio, and everywhere across the country is expensive. So there's both a capital part of it, which is when you have to build something new, but then there's the other part of it, that is what we call "operation and maintenance". And that's just the day-to-day costs that it takes to run the infrastructure that you have.
Manny Teodoro
Affordability is closely related to the size of a utility. Large systems, the Clevelands, the Toledos, they get a lot of attention because a lot of people live there. And so, there's a tendency for us, I think, sometimes to think that water affordability is a problem of cities. But actually, the most severe affordability problems are in smaller systems. In the state of Ohio, yeah, there are affordability challenges in Cleveland and Toledo, but there are probably just as severe challenges where small communities lack the economies of scale, and the kind of expertise in human capital to really have excellent systems that run efficiently.
Amy Klei
Across the board, there is a tremendous diversity of our water systems. From the big Cincinnati, Columbus, Cleveland, down to small mom and pop, what we call "transient systems", the smallest systems that might have a single well. The challenges and the solutions are going to vary depending on where you are. In the rural areas, there's a whole 'nother set of challenges. Sometimes there's geography issues or distance.
Nicholas Breyfogle
A defining characteristic of systems that provide clean water in the United States is their fragmentation. According to a 2019 report authored by Dr. Mani Teodoro, there are approximately 1200 community water systems in Ohio alone. The largest 26 of these serve almost 6 million people in Ohio, more than half the state's population. But almost 900 of these water systems are small or very small, serving less than 3000 people each. Together, they collectively serve only about 6% of Ohio's population. The financial challenges for small systems can be daunting, because they have a smaller customer base to pay for their expensive water infrastructure. The Ohio EPA as well as water policy specialists have long advocated for the consolidation of some of these systems to create economies of scale.
Amy Klei
We've seen a lot of regional systems have some success, and we've been trying to support those with dedicated funding as well.
Jerry Rouch
We've been lucky to be able to work with several projects where communities have implemented what we would call a "regionalization project", meaning that they chose to work together. One good example was the village of new Waterford and the Crestview School District. The Crestview school district, which is a public water system, was having a lot of struggles trying to maintain their water system and provide good quality water. The school is only about a mile or two outside out of the village of new Waterford, so when they did their analysis, they decided that it was cheaper and more efficient to have the village send a line out to the Crestview school and supply water.
Shane Patrone
My name is Shane Patrone. I'm the mayor for the village New Waterford. We're a rural community, there's not a lot of population, our town is between 1000 to 1500 people. We're close to everywhere, but it's kind of quiet here. We like our small-town life. We got a good local school district that's very involved in the community, and we've run a water line about two miles up the road to our local school district, Crestview Local Schools. We just completed that, matter of fact, we're doing bacteria testing, for those who know what that is. So we're just in the final throes of doing that, and then we'll actually be able to move forward with that. Now, we do have some residents that live outside the village that are along that new line that have expressed interest. About 10 to 13 new customers already want to be added to the village water system. When you're small, especially like us, you have to find a way to still cover your fixed costs. There's a fee there. If I had 4000 people, that fee could probably be $12/customer instead of $37. So that part makes it hard, that plays a big part, and the only future I see for towns like us is expanding our water base, whether it's expanding the village corporation limits, or expanding services for water or sewer outside of the village. You need to grow, or continue to increase that base, or you're stuck increasing those costs as they go up because electric, gas, they don't go down for you at home, they don't go down for us as a town. So as they increase, that bill goes up, whether you spread it among the 800 or 400 or the 4000. We know we need to expand, it's gotta happen. We can't continue to ask the same 480 water customer accounts to continue to pay more and more as costs increase, so we know we have to have more customers. So, expansion is the only way to do that. Well our plan was, ... first you make sure you have the water. So we put in new wells, we added the water supply. The second issue was what are our major problems? We added new filters for our water plant, upgraded our water plant so we can handle the additional supply, and then the distribution system. Now we're in a position where we can go out to outside community areas that want water.
Chad Hess
All of our wells come in at this one point right here. We have our raw flow meter that tracks everything we bring in. From there, you can follow the top line, that's all the raw water that's going into each of our filters,. We redid the plant a couple years ago. Each filter is right for 83 gallons per minute. From there, goes down to the bottom blue line and it goes into our clear well on the other side. Once it goes through there, we have our two service pumps that send it out to the village. We're not a direct feed into towers, everyone's tapped in along the way. So as it's going to our storage facilities, people are using it. That's about it. It's a really simple, efficient operation. That's what, when we were looking at upgrading, we want to get the easiest, most user-friendly. Anyone can come in, grab the binder I have for all of our SOPs, look at the backwash, and just 1,2,3,4, right down the steps.
Chad Hess
So this is the sewer side. All of our headworks come in here through a newly updated automatic fine screen to get all the rags and the grit. Then the treatment process we use is an open-air extended aeration. So, what you see behind you is our three aeration ditches, that brings the oxygen into it, it keeps the right bugs alive to cannibalize the solids and keep the bad bacteria out. This is one of the easier plants to run.
Jerry Rouch
The Division of Environmental and Financial Assistance administers the Drinking Water Assistance Fund and other funding programs that provide financing to communities and public water systems for their infrastructure needs. So on an average year, we work with approximately 100 communities on wastewater infrastructure projects, and maybe 80 or 90 communities on drinking water infrastructure projects. They come from all around the state and on an average year, we may finance perhaps six or seven hundred million dollars’ worth of projects on the wastewater side, and maybe about two hundred, two hundred fifty million dollars’ worth of projects on the drinking water side.
Shane Patrone
Well, for someone the sizing of Waterford, and for the smaller communities, there's no feasible way for us to change our distribution system, add lines, update stuff without the possibility of grants. The cost involved in pipe and valves and fire hydrants have just increased and continue to increase every year. It would probably take about 400 years for the average, you know, town like New Waterford to pay for that type of system. Given the 50-year lifespan for a distribution system, we'll be a little bit outdated by the time that we'd get a new replacement.
Nicholas Breyfogle
New Waterford is a good example of how local officials can take proactive measures to build and maintain modern water infrastructure. The process can be rewarding, but also time consuming, not to mention financially straining.
Interviewer
Do you run into people sometimes who complain about their water bill?
Chad Hess
Every now and again, you'll hear the grumblings., and usually what I tell them is, you know, we're one of the only areas in the state, not even bringing up our size, that within the last four or five years, everything is brand new. We live in a small town. So, unfortunately, one of the drawbacks of that is you don't have as many people, so it costs a little bit extra. So, we just kind of like to remind them, you know, our water bill is a little bit higher, but we've made all these improvements, and then we remind them as well that through RCAP's assistance and EPA and rural water and USDA, all the grant work that came in, we're able to get a lot of taxpayer money back to finance these projects. I pay more for my cell phone bill than I do for my water and sewer, right, so.
Interviewer
Cool, all right, Chad, thanks man.
Chad Hess
Oh, you're welcome.
Nicholas Breyfogle
New Waterford's line extensions are an example of successful consolidation of water services. Another example to look at, is Mount Air, an even smaller community in Ohio, where neighbors have historically managed their own drinking water system.
Laura Kunze
Mount Air started off as, kind of, a weekend retreat vacation wellness community for professionals. A lot of the homes were built in the 20s, 30s, 40s. A lot of unique features and a lot of challenges along with that as well. We have not a lot of homes on small one lane streets in a very wooded, secluded area, but we are literally minutes from 270, 315, any conveniences we need are right at our fingertips, but it truly feels like we're living in the woods, and I love it that way. So when the houses were originally built, given they weren't year-round, we were all on septic and individual wells. Over the years some of the homes started to have individual well failures and there was a gentleman down the street, he created a nice well and a pump down there, and they started connecting homes to the system and over time, 40s, 50s, 60s, it evolved into about 50 homes that were on this community well system. We understand better than most neighborhoods how interconnected we are. We've had to work together, especially the last number of years, to keep water coming to everybody's homes, and we've had to work as a team. And we've had to be, you know, very much aware of our neighbors who, when the waters down, maybe can't carry gallons of water around, and flush their toilets, and go to the store and buy, you know, bottled water and things like that. We understood what it was to be a community, and I don't know that a lot of neighborhoods these days have those opportunities.
Bill Ash
839, 800. 839, 800. 600 So, yesterday we used 9600 gallons, which was quite a bit less than the day before, which does surprise me. And then I took the chlorine test here, in the, what they call plant production, which is a fancy name for a pump house. This is something that has to be done every single day, and if I am gone out of town, or whatever, I have to arrange for somebody to come and do it. I've got two of our neighbors trained as backup. I do tend to leave the lights on, so I've got a house plant here growing through the wall. I am actually a Class A certified water system operator. I would say the biggest challenge in having to run the system, well, first of all, being consistent. You know, you have to incorporate it in just your morning routine, like you get up and brush your teeth, you get up and brush your teeth and go down and do the testing. And then the second thing was, particularly early on, knowing what to do when there's a break. It was a matter of calling up neighbors say, "Hey, you want to come out and play in the mud?" And there are a number of folks that had stepped up over the years to do that in all kinds of weather. Our current system is not metered, so there's a flat rate that everybody would pay per quarter, and it's for all the water you could use. You know, the system is over 60 years old, and I always try to acknowledge that it was a wonderful neighborhood project at that time, but it's 60 years old, and it just was getting to the point where it just was not going to be able to go on.
Laura Kunze
We started noticing we were having more frequent breaks and the breaks were, you know, not the normal wear and tear things. These were splits in the line, vertical splits, these were as we were making repairs, we were finding the lines were crumbling. More and more breaks, more and more repairs, more and more expense. We realized at that point that our system was going to need something major, and we didn't know how extensive it was going to need to be, and we didn't know how big of a project that would be, but I knew that we were on borrowed time, and that was about eight years ago. I contacted City of Columbus, I contacted Delco Water and Aqua, so the three basic systems that were in near proximity, just to say, you know, what would it take, you know, what are our options here? We got into a lot of conversation at that point with the EPA about our concerns, the frequent breaks, our concern that we weren't going to be able to maintain the water quality, we weren't going to be able to stay in compliance.
Nicholas Breyfogle
As the neighbors looked for alternatives to build a more resilient and modern water system, they decided to create a Regional Water District. Often water and sewer districts are simply providers of clean water services. They have their own pumps, their own wells, their own drinking water and wastewater treatment plants. In Mount Air, the residents were less ambitious, but not less strategic. They wanted to create a water district for three main reasons. First, so that legally they would have better access to public financing to update their system. Second, so that they could engage in a contract with a water company that would sell them water.
Laura Kunze
So our closest and least expensive option was Delco
Nicholas Breyfogle
And third, so that they could assess property owners for the charges that would apply for the construction of the new system.
Laura Kunze
We were able to get a 30 year no-interest loan, which covered the cost of the construction, which was in and of itself amazing. A new home being built is going to pay the assessment fee, which right now stands at $16,000, likely to come down when the construction costs are finished
Bill Ash
The water is great. It's about a tenth of the hardness of the water that we had before, no sediment in it. Our dishwasher is nice and clean now, it doesn’t have scale all over it. Our kitchen sink isn't spraying all over, you know, with the faucet getting all the mineral deposit on it. And so I think overall, everything has really come out very, very well. The last little pieces are finally just falling into place.
Laura Kunze
Our community is sharing the cost to run our lines, and people don't realize how expensive water lines are until they have to run a whole new system. The balance for us is that we realize the values of our homes are going to go up by virtue of having a sustainable, centralized water source. So for us, the alternative wasn't "do we stay with our old system and keep it going or upgrade at cost?" It was, we're going to not have water at all, or we have to do this upgrade. And what's the least expensive upgrade that brings us the best value and a long-term future. And our neighborhood keeps it in the township we we stumbled into that it was a miracle.
Bryan Stubbs
Well, the story of Cleveland is not so different than most cities, I would say, east of the Mississippi River, which are older, more industrial cities. Water, for decades, was a throwaway commodity utility. We stopped funding infrastructure. And our infrastructure, and our water infrastructure sat there, just kind of dormant for decades before we realized, hey, we actually need clean water, we need to invest, and because of that rates had to go up.
Laura Kunze
One test, known as a fermentation test, indicates the presence of contamination. Furthermore, the water is examined for microscopic organisms.
Nicholas Breyfogle
Rates for drinking and wastewater treatment grew as cities like Cleveland developed their water infrastructure to meet the regulatory mandates and standards necessary to secure clean water. As sewer and water rates increased, so did the number of customers who fell behind in paying their bills. This was a problem for many years, but the COVID-19 pandemic made it worse. One report shows that in Northeast Ohio, the number of homeowners and renters that are at least a month late in their bills tripled during the pandemic. When customers fall behind in their water bills, utilities eventually shut off their service and, in many instances, can place a water bill tax lien on delinquent properties. This means that customers who failed to pay their bills could have their properties foreclosed, a problem that affects poor families almost exclusively. Because one of the central messages from public officials in the earlier stages of the pandemic was to urge people to wash their hands often, Cleveland Water, the public utility that provides water to the city, enacted a shutoff moratorium in March 2020 to ensure that everybody could access clean water on a sustained basis. The moratorium lasted until July 2021 when the utility resumed disconnections for non-paying customers. Many decry these shutoffs as inhumane and detrimental to public health, but others defend shutoffs, arguing that only a small percentage of delinquent customers are actually struggling financially to pay their bills. They argue that, after all, there are water affordability programs available to customers, but only a fraction of qualified users chooses to enroll in them. Advocates for water affordability argued that this is an area where utilities need to make a considerable improvement, especially investing more in public outreach, so the populations in need can take advantage of the affordability programs they offer. Water affordability advocates often engage in heated debates with utilities about how to protect affordability for struggling customers, but these relationships don't always have to be contentious. In Cleveland, a community of leaders from different backgrounds have been able to work together to engage in meaningful conversations about the value of water infrastructure, and who should pay for it.
Crystal M.C. Davis
We created the Greater Cleveland Water Equity Group, and so that group is comprised of community groups, local water authorities and agencies, and various entities from throughout the community in Greater Cleveland. One of the subcommittees is the Water Affordability Subcommittee and I sit on that committee where we're having conversations about community education - what are some of the changes that we need to make in Northeast Ohio? How can we better work together?
Nicholas Breyfogle
These conversations have been instrumental in helping improve affordability programs offered by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, a large utility that serves the wastewater treatment needs of Cleveland and 61 other communities across 350 square miles. The water infrastructure the district operates is not cheap.
Kathryn Crestani
Treating the wastewater is difficult because we have a lot of different inputs, and we have a large volume. We, at this plant, handle about 100 million gallons per day of wastewater. The typical size of a wastewater plant in the state of Ohio is up to 10 million gallons per day. So we are definitely much bigger in terms of that volume of water that comes in. It comes in dirty from the sewers, and it goes out clean out to the river. And in the middle, we're cleaning it by removing a bunch of solids in various processes.
Kathryn Crestani
Basically, you can see down there with those little teeth, kind of like a comb, and stuff will stick to the bottom of it and then they'll scrape it up and drop it onto the conveyor belt in the back. The conveyor belt thing goes and drops this stuff into the pan, and it's catching all the big stuff that's in the water, like paper towel wipe type of material is probably the most common. Now that we're heading toward fall, we'll see a ton of leaves, and then trash, like you see water bottles in here, cans, all that kind of stuff.
Kathryn Crestani
The solids then have to have somewhere to go, so what happens in a lot of cities is something like we do, which is incineration.
Kathryn Crestani
The sludge is being fed into the centrifuge, and the water is being squeezed out of it, so that then the sludge is pretty dry when you're done. We call it cake after it's pretty dry. This is a pump that feeds the cake all the way through over to where the incinerators are on the other side of the building.
Kathryn Crestani
If we do it right, if the sludge is dry enough, and when we have our conditions set up just right, we don't even need any other fuel except for the fuel value of the sewage. Some of the heat from that process can make steam to spin a turbine, and when we have a good amount of steam going, that's enough to power all of the process equipment in the building.
Cheryl Soltis-Muth
This is our biology team. In the summertime, this is a very happening place. We do beach monitoring. Our plants are required to chlorinate their effluent, so we have bacteria samples from the plants, storm water samples, and they'll run hundreds of samples a day. One of the tests that we run is something called whole effluent toxicity. It's where we take our treated effluent and we put native species in it to make sure there's no signs of toxicity. These are fathead minnow. Ah! See they're coming up, they think I'm food! We basically take very small, like less than 24 hour, organisms to do the tests on. These are all of our breeding fish, they lay eggs. I don't know if you can see in there, you can see the little fry. That's what we do the tests on.
Nicholas Breyfogle
Work at the lab is key to ensure that the treated water reaches all the regulatory standards mandated by the Federal Clean Water Act.
Cheryl Soltis-Muth
There's something called the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System, NPDES. That is the program that dictates what is on our discharge permits. It tells us what parameters we have to test for, what sampling points at the plant we have to... if it's the raw influent, the treated effluent, if it's the sludge, if it's downstream on the Cuyahoga River, it defines all of that, as well as the frequency that we have to test.
Nicholas Breyfogle
So who pays for the water treatment plants, the labs, and the salaries of the hundreds of workers who work for the district?
Constance Haqq
The vast majority of the dollars that we have available come from our ratepayers. We finance our major projects through low-interest loans that the federal government provides, but the loans have to be paid back, and those dollars that pay them back come from our ratepayers. Every five years we do a rate study, and that study, basically, in the most simplistic terms looks at what are our financial needs to run this organization, to provide the service to our customers, and what is the amount of money we need to collect for those. But we also have always looked at affordability. So we have, for many years, offered affordability or cost-saving programs.
Nicholas Breyfogle
The district offers different programs to keep their services affordable to individuals in need. The affordability program is for low-income individuals, regardless of age or ability. Enrolled customers receive a 40% discount on their sewer bill. Starting on January 1, 2022, the district made a couple of important changes to this program.
Constance Haqq
It's the affordability program that we recently enhanced, offering it to renters. It has long been an issue in our industry - how do we reach renters? And we discovered through our rate study that many of them pay the sewer and water bill directly, and in those cases, we are offering the same 40% discount.
Nicholas Breyfogle
Everybody concerned with the issue of affordability agrees that these changes are a step in the right direction. But what prompted the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District to adopt these changes?
Crystal M.C. Davis
I think they did some very necessary work in community listening. They met with the advocacy community several times to talk about the needs of the community. I know I went in and did several presentations about our community listening tour to make them aware of what I was hearing in communities throughout Northeast Ohio. Additionally, they also convened an internal water affordability group or task force to really examine what are some of the things and changes that they can make that did not require state legislation, that did not require some additional federal investment. And so, that's the type of thought leadership that we need to start to address the challenges that we're seeing across the region, honestly.
Constance Haqq
Nonprofit organizations, advocacy organizations play a major role. They do a great deal of "boots on the ground" listening to what communities need. They provide information about those needs, making sure that information is shared. I think their perspectives are very important, and they certainly informed us, but we also do a lot of education of the NGOs so that they also understand our perspective.
Nicholas Breyfogle
While encouraging changes seem to be taking place, efforts to improve affordability must continue, as many families still struggle to pay their bills on time.
Crystal M.C. Davis
We know that we need debt forgiveness programs. We need a moratorium, a permanent moratorium on water shutoffs, because that is not the solution to providing aid to families in their time of need. We need emergency assistance programs. And then we need to really improve relationships with local utilities so that we could influence water rate setting processes and make sure that community is at the table for that process.
Nick Komives
Toledo is really too hard on itself. The interesting thing is if you look around, there's so much here. There's a lot of natural beauty in this area, we're right on a great lake, so we have a lot of access to outdoor activities and recreation, which is really wonderful, all centered on water.
Nicholas Breyfogle
Nick Komives chairs the Water Quality and Sustainability Committee of Toledo City Council. This committee is tasked with overseeing the city's Department of Public Utilities, which in turn provides drinking water and wastewater treatment services to residents in Toledo and its surrounding area. Toledo's Water Treatment Plant filters an average of 75 million gallons of water per day.
Nick Komives
We supply water to about a half a million people in this region, and that is a huge deal for us. But the affordability piece is where we're lacking, and I think that a lot can be done legislatively to correct that.
Nicholas Breyfogle
In Toledo, discussions about water quality and affordability are not new. The Maumee River, which runs through the city, has long been identified as the main culprit in the annual harmful algal blooms that affect Lake Erie, and Lake Erie is where Toledo gets its drinking water. Every spring, as rains intensify, the Maumee River collects runoff from farms in a wide area of the state. The runoff is heavy in phosphorus and nitrogen, which farmers use to fertilize their fields. These nutrients can help trigger algal blooms in Lake Erie when water temperatures rise. The blooms can contaminate the water with dangerous toxins, which, in turn, can negatively affect humans that consume it. On August 2, 2014, residents of Toledo awoke to urgent warnings from their Public Utility Department not to drink or use their tap water. Toxins from a harmful algal bloom had penetrated the city's drinking water system. The warning remained in effect for over 50 hours.
Ina Sidney
Oh, that was crazy, because we were supposed to have a little family reunion. When the announcement came, I just immediately jumped up and had to go try to get water. I have family that went to a funeral in Detroit, I sent them a text and said, "while y'all up there, get water". I have a godson in Columbus, I even told him, "you get some water, I'll meet you halfway".
Nicholas Breyfogle
Mrs. Sidney is a resident of the junction, a Toledo neighborhood where neighbors quickly organized to face this crisis.
Alicia Smith
We found out at five o'clock in the morning. Our young people woke up and got into trucks and got into their parents’ vehicles, and went to get gallons and cases of water, delivering it to our elders and mothers with children, because there's a disparity of transportation - families couldn't get out. And so there was no water at our local convenience stores. And there was price gouging because people knew that folks would be buying water. So we drove to Detroit, Michigan, we drove to areas where we could get access to water, bottled water.
Ina Sidney
I do have a couple seniors on my block, so I was getting them water. So it was crazy, because then you thinkin like, you gotta take the bottled water to wash up with, so you had to go old school.
Major Smith
The only thing I can say was very traumatic, it was the closest thing to something, um, to being apocalyptic. We were without water for three or four days, which opened a lot of people's eyes to how important water is to just basic living. There's a lady that drinks a cup of coffee every morning, and we knocked on her door and we grabbed her coffee, because it was green. As an elderly lady, her vision wasn't as it used to be, she had this cup of coffee that's supposed to be black, it actually had a green tint to it.
Nicholas Breyfogle
The water crisis refocused the mission of the junction coalition whose members became more active in demanding that city officials double their efforts to provide access to clean and affordable water.
Alicia Smith
Junction has worked to create a community water council, where the community, nothing but the community, politicians can't sit on that council, we don't want them over there. That allows for folks to have a viable voice to speak up and speak out for the change they want - for their water systems, their affordability, their water quality and their access to safe, affordable drinking water.
Nicholas Breyfogle
As local advocates started joining forces and paying more attention to the importance of protecting access to clean water for all, a coalition of NGOs, elected officials, and utility workers started to take shape.
Nick Komives
Several water advocates in this area and I kept having conversations, and I decided through some conversations with them that we would create a formal consumer protection group that would be set up. So it was passed by resolution, it's a binding contract, or a binding thing that the city must do now at this point. Now, because of this relationship that we've created, gives the residents of the city a meaningful voice in the decisions that are being made about their water, right, because government is made up of people and so it's their decision to have, so we've ultimately created a direct line for residents to interact with our head of the Department of Public Utilities. So any decision about water affordability, about conservation, about upgrades to our infrastructure, is looked at by the people who live in the city, and that has made it so much better and so much easier for us, because you have ultimate buy-in, and we're building trust that has long been eroded. I will say, in the beginning, it was pretty contentious - who's gonna be there, who's gonna attend, you know, what ultimately can we do, what can we say, who gets to say those sorts of things. They're all, you know, working those things out in the beginning can be a little bit of a challenge. And also, I think maybe the most important part hinging on this was just, sort of, the relationship that I think naturally happens between a government and people, right? I mean, people have a distrust of government. That's just true anywhere you go. I don't think that there's a place in the world where that's not true.
Alicia Smith
There was times where we had to pull his coattails and say, "Now, Councilman, we asked for A, B, C, or D, now". And he says, "well, how does that look?", because he doesn't know, but he's willing to listen, and that is all you can ask for from a council person, because they're there to serve the people.
Nicholas Breyfogle
Similar to other communities, the city of Toledo offers affordability programs for water users. But despite the availability of these programs, neighbors demanded deeper changes to secure affordable access to water. As a result, the Consumer Protection Board and the Water Affordability Task Force spearheaded several initiatives to work towards this goal. Perhaps the most important of these initiatives is a new debt forgiveness program for low-income, senior, or disabled Toledo residents. Under the program, those qualifying individuals who owe at least $200 in their water, sewer, and stormwater bills prior to October 2021, can have their debts forgiven, provided that they pay their more recent bills consistently.
Nick Komives
We hold right now about $30 million in back water bills throughout the city, because people simply can't afford them. We're never gonna get most of that money back, but many of those folks might need a house somewhere else, and they're gonna need access to water, and it's necessary, right? So we should be doing all that we can to alleviate their financial burden. It's the right thing to do at the end of the day.
Nicholas Breyfogle
While offering a debt forgiveness program is by itself innovative, the devil is often in the details. How can implementation of this program be made effective? This is where utilities must show their commitment to affordability by ramping up their outreach efforts to inform the affected populations of their choices.
Cindy Geronimo
What we recognized is although we have all these affordability initiatives, we're not the best at promoting them, and also making it so that people can get through that process easily.
Nicholas Breyfogle
As the city of Toledo continues its efforts to protect and promote affordable access to clean water, one of its main challenges is to rebuild the trust in its water services that was damaged by the 2014 water crisis. After almost eight years, some Toledo residents are still wary of drinking the water provided by the city.
Manny Teodoro
We know that, empirically, if people do not believe in the quality of their water, they're going to substitute with much more expensive commercial bottled water.
Cindy Geronimo
In the past, you know, we've not been the best at promoting the quality of our water and saying, you know, like, "Hey, you don't need to keep buying bottled water". Like during the summer, you'll see stores with stockpiles of water in the front, because they're leveraging that as like, oh, you know, people will have to buy a bottle of water, and that's not true, you can, you know, you're paying for tap water, you can use tap water and feel confident that it's safe and it's quality water.
Ina Sidney
We still drink bottled water. Um...
Ina Sidney
Uh huh, I don't out the faucet, even though I have a filter. But it's always just gonna be stuck in my head, like, what are we drinking?
Interviewer
To this day?
Manny Teodoro
Distrust is actually contagious. So you can live in a community where the tap water is of excellent quality, but if you read about a high profile drinking water failure, like Toledo, you might come to distrust your own community's water system, even though your community's water system is fine. The only way you're going to rebuild trust in those systems is by literally rebuilding those systems and making sure they're excellent. And it will take a long time, and it may take years, it may take a generation
Nick Komives
When it comes to water in Toledo, you can count on our residents, our community, really having a huge role in what's happening. And I have seen the most repair of trust within government happen when we include people in this way.
Alicia Smith
Leadership is a beautiful thing. When you have done the people power building, when you've taken the time, and you've listened, when you see the harm that not having quality water has done
Nicholas Breyfogle
In all likelihood, as the efforts to rebuild trust continue, decision makers will be increasingly pressured by those they serve, who believe that no decisions about something as critical as water can be made without their input.
Alicia Smith
The engineers are at the table, the politicians are at the table, making decisions based on their income, based on their privilege. You can't do that when you have something as precious as liquid gold - water. And we're not asking public utilities to come to the table, they have to. There's a demand from the community, there's demand from the people ,that you need to sit down and hear the voices of those who have lived without their water
Manny Teodoro
There are no easy answers. The causes of our water affordability problems are complicated, and complicated problems usually require complicated solutions. We need to do lots of things to address affordability, there's no one thing that's going to solve all of the problems
Alicia Smith
I ask folks what they want done to them, for them, and do it with them. Nothing about us without us.
