My city privatized our water and is celebrating “being out of debt” meanwhile taxes are still rising and my water bill was $350 last month. My sewage another $120 through the same company. Not to mention I had to put $9k into “updating” my swear line to be compatible with the new company. And for every month I hadn’t updated I had to pay a $95 fee. I literally paid almost $600 a month a one point for fucking water. Homelessness is going up and people are ditching houses around here cause they can’t afford to live in a shithole but hey the city’s out of debt I guess?
Oh and I missed my payment my 2 days and got shut off last week so I’m expecting a high bill again in “restart” fees even though they didn’t have to send anyone out here for it.
Fuck privatized water
This story makes me feel real stabby.
Wow, that’s ridiculous. My “city utilities” bill is like $130 and includes water, sewer, pressurized irrigation (non-drinkable water), and garbage/recycling. And I live in a desert climate, so we have to maintain reservoirs and whatnot.
Oh, and our city is also out of debt. The only debt we had was when the state forced our city to abandon our municipal ISP mid-rollout, so we had to sell the network at a loss. We’re trying again, but with a different model where we’re not fronting as much cash.
Your city doesn’t need to have debt to keep utility costs down, it just needs decent leadership.
Ya, look up Johnstown PA. Home of one of the worst “natural disasters” in US history that happened to be caused by a rich asshole who didn’t care about people. This was the city that built Pittsburgh and it lost literally everything overnight and corrupt leaders made sure that industry never returned. We’re now known as a great stop on the PA drug highway because of the corruption. Nothings improved since they finally got out of the debt. It’s only gotten worse. And we’re still paying taxes on a flood from the 1800’s. Realistically they sold off the water lines to a private company and pocketed the profit and are publicly celebrating screwing people over. And it will never change.
Wow, that’s terrible. From my reading, this is the series of events:
- Rich group bought the old reservoir to use as a sporting resort
- Group modified the dam to be lower to support a road, and failed to repair the emergency release equipment
- Record rainfall caused rivers to surge
- Rides sent to Johnstown warning of the impending failure of the dam were ignored
- The dam burst because they couldn’t release water (see 2) and tons of people died because they had no warning (see 4)
So not only was there a natural disaster, but two other errors that both could have avoided loss of life.
Andrew Carnegie is celebrated in Pittsburgh but is abhorrently hated around here. For good reason. But you got it pretty right on the nose.
They wanna profit off the water before the water wars begin. Usually the war comes first.
Potential upside: I know several housing collectives who sued for collective ownership of their trailer parks over disputes with rusty water. Of course, they literally lost thousands of dollars in damages clothing and in lost income from illness before that was possible.
