Baltimore voters have already nixed water and sewage privatization

The Sun published an op ed advocating for privatization of Baltimore’s water and sewer system by one David Williams, president of the Taxpayer Protection Alliance (“Could privatization solve the problems at Baltimore’s Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant?” April 22). A check of SourceWatch (sourcewatch.org) reveals that this benign-sounding organization is “an advocacy front group that is part of the Koch political network” and gets most of its money from Koch-related organizations. It is not so surprising to see calls for privatization from such a source, but it is a little, in view of the fact that over three-fourths of Baltimore voters voted for a permanent bar to privatization less than four years ago. Either Mr. Williams is surprisingly ill-informed, or he has a strange idea of the meaning of permanent. Clean water is still a public good, and public management is ensured by the city charter. What we need is a properly managed public system such as we used to have, not billionaires sending their hirelings to fish for a profit in a place where they are barred from making one.