Overcoming Municipal Sticker Shock

By Kevin Westerling, Editor, Water Online

The municipal water industry has been painfully aware for years that America’s water infrastructure is ailing and that funding needed to restore and expand it is scarce, to say the least. But, even the jaded had to shudder at the proposed price tag: a not-so-cool $1T(!) over the next 25 years.

The staggering trillion-dollar estimate was submitted by the American Water Works Association (AWWA) in its February report Buried No Longer: Confronting America’s Infrastructure Challenge. The AWWA analysis trumps the U.S. EPA’s latest Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment, published in 2009, which pegged the cost at “only” $334.8B over 20 years. It seems the EPA was low-balling us.