Customers should be outraged at Back River’s failures

The 400,000-plus customers of Baltimore’s municipal water system — households that have paid higher and higher fees over the last 20 years for the delivery of tap water and the treatment of sewage — should be outraged over the repeated failures of the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant, prompting the state to seize control of it.

But, before I get into that stinking mess, a little perspective on the cost of stuff.

Since the pandemic arrived, I’ve heard several of my fellow Americans say that the price of things (food, particularly) had been unrealistically low, and that people in numerous jobs (health care workers, particularly) had been underpaid.

Maybe they didn’t mean to suggest a willingness to pay more for skinless chicken thighs or for the wages of nursing assistants. Maybe their comments were mere reflections in the moment, with the pandemic disrupting supply chains and with exhausted workers expressing an unwillingness to return to low-paying jobs.

But I took it to mean that at least some Americans accept that a lot of us, middle class and up, have had it good for a while: plentiful food and consumer products with generally low inflation over three decades. Gasoline prices have risen, but it took 20

Dan Rodricks years to get from $1.15 a gallon to $3.61, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

During most of that time, the federal minimum wage stayed at only $7.25 an hour, though half of the states have higher minimums by now. (Maryland’s is $12.50; for tipped employees, it’s only $3.63.)

I won’t argue that things have been dandy for everybody. Income disparity is still a hard reality. “The highest-earning 20% of families made more than half of all U.S. income in 2018,” the Pew Research Center report in 2020. If you use the calculus of United Way of Central Maryland, some 40% of families in this wealthy state are essentially the working poor — barely able to keep up with the costs of rent, food, utilities, child care and transportation. And that was before the rise in inflation.

So not enough people make enough money. Opinion polling shows the awareness of that fact has reached those who, in related surveys, say they feel adequately compensated.

This is all part of a recognition that the cost of a decent quality of life (in goods, services and environment) is greater than what we’ve been paying.

Unfortunately, this reckoning has not reached the public sphere, where there’s a ridiculous political divide. Consider that, during the Trump administration, the Republican Congress felt it more important to cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations than to increase spending for the nation’s infrastructure.

It wasn’t until November, with Joe Biden as president, that the nation got $1.1 trillion in new infrastructure spending.

But then one man, Democratic Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia, was able to kill Biden’s Build Back Better package — trillions more over 10 years for universal pre-K, an expansion of health care access and initiatives to address climate change. That represented not only a failure of our legislative system, but obtuse denial of deep-seated problems that existed before the pandemic, and the cost of fixing them.

In Baltimore, there’s one area where this awareness of cost existed long before the pandemic — water and sewage. We had a reckoning on this because the failures of the system were long ago visible and smellable.

I’ve watched my water bill rise steadily with a combination of astonishment and understanding: On one hand, I’m shocked that tap water no longer costs pennies; on the other, I recognize that the old, leaking system has been in need of massive repair for years. I’ve seen the horrid god Odious rise when the Jones Falls fills with millions of gallons of sewage-tainted water during a rainstorm. It’s an abhorrent torrent that appears when stormwater pours through cracks in sewer pipes and overwhelms the century-old system.

Twenty years ago, Baltimore entered into a consent decree with the Environmental Protection Agency and the Maryland Department of the Environment to stop polluting local waters that flow into the Chesapeake Bay. The city has spent $1.78 billion so far to repair the system. Our water bills come with fees to pay for this.

Do I like it? No. Do I understand and accept it? Yes, but I don’t have much choice. The system needs to be fixed if we’re ever going to have cleaner waters in the harbor and the bay. Read the city’s highly detailed reports on the project and you’d feel confident that a lot of progress has been made, especially on sewage overflow.

And yet, last summer, The Sun found that both the Back River plant and the Patapsco Wastewater Treatment Plant had been illegally dumping millions of gallons of partially treated sewage into the waters that flow into the Chesapeake Bay. This went on without detection for months.

It’s infuriating that, after all this time and all that money, we still have these problems.

Now things have gotten so bad at Back River, the state has taken over operations. I guess that’s a good thing.

But, whatever the reason for the failures — incompetent management, staffing shortages, fewer inspections by regulators — a mess on a big project like this undercuts public faith in the city’s system and in our willingness as citizens to accept the increasing costs of a higher quality of life.