Fix the water authority. Now
Its epic failures endanger Pittsburgh residents and the city’s economic future
The report issued this month by the Pennsylvania auditor general regarding governance of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority confirms what many in this community have believed for quite some time about the tenuous state of affairs at the authority: The threats to public health and safety created by long-neglected infrastructure require the city to act with urgency to avoid unraveling the enormous economic, environmental and quality-of-life progress Pittsburgh has made in recent decades.
As the CEO of PNC Financial Services Group, I worry about the well-being of 11,500 employees who work in the city each day, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of our neighbors who rely on the PWSA to deliver safe drinking water. As a city resident myself with a family of five, I am deeply concerned as more details emerge about the degree to which leaders at the PWSA have for years neglected their responsibility and failed our community.
According to the auditor general’s report, the PWSA has been mismanaged for decades. The result has been a lack of commitment to the agency’s principal mandate, severe underinvestment in necessary capital improvements to maintain the integrity of the system and breakdowns across virtually every facet of the PWSA’s operations, from water delivery to customer service, billing, staffing and information technology. An interim report by the consulting firm Infrastructure Management Group in August noted that “PWSA is barely holding on,” and it wasn’t wrong.
In just the past year, the PWSA has been forced to issue multiple boil-water advisories for up to half of the system — most recently from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5, when tens of thousands of homes and businesses in Pittsburgh’s northern neighborhoods were affected. Only one of the three reservoirs in the system is currently operational. And lead levels exceed the EPA threshold. The situation is neither safe nor sustainable.
Recognizing the enormous challenges faced by the PWSA, Mayor Bill Peduto has engaged IMG to explore options and develop a plan to swiftly begin addressing these issues. This is an important first step toward solving this problem once and for all, but the reports from the auditor general and IMG should be wake-up calls to decision makers and the public that work must be done and that fixing these problems will not come without a price.
The PWSA has very high debt, and the system needs an estimated $2.5 billion in capital improvements. Just yesterday it was reported that PWSA customers will see rates rise nearly 50 percent over the next three years to pay for the work that must be done. But, as we have seen in places like Flint, Mich., recently or looking back at the Milwaukee parasite outbreak in 1993 that killed 69 people, our community cannot accept the risk and should never have to bear the potential cost of not taking action to ensure the quality of our water supply.
Through our collective efforts over time, Pittsburgh has reestablished itself as a place where people want to live, work, visit, create, innovate and build businesses. We have worked for decades and continue to work across the business community today to improve our environment, preserve green spaces, reclaim brownfields, develop energy in a safe and responsible manner and to become a center of sustainability leadership because we are committed to passing on to our children a place where our quality of life is improving rather than declining.
If we as a community are truly serious about that commitment, we need to begin now to take the necessary steps to remedy the problems at the PWSA so that we can keep pushing our region forward and ensure the safety and wellbeing of our families, friends and neighbors now and for generations to come.