WWEMA Window: Where's The Funding?
Cherry trees in full bloom, Water Week, the U.S. Water Prize, the WWEMA Water Challenge, and a Congressional Technology Exposition all provided an exciting backdrop to the WWEMA Washington Forum April 13 to 15 in Washington, D.C. The many activities of the week brought together hundreds of leaders in the water industry to discuss the value of water and opportunities to enhance funding for drinking water and wastewater needs across the country. Frank Rebori, WWEMA Chairman and President of Smith & Loveless, Inc., identified funding as a top priority for WWEMA this year, which carried through the theme of the WWEMA Washington Forum program — Where’s the Funding? Making the Most of New Opportunities.
To set the stage for the Washington Forum, on March 12 WWEMA launched the #NoWater Challenge, a social media campaign that ran through Water Week, ending on April 18th. The goal of the campaign was to raise awareness of the value of water and the need for adequate funding for water and wastewater infrastructure. WWEMA members, industry associations, all members of the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, college students, and others were urged to spread the message through Facebook and Twitter accounts using the #NoWater hashtag by describing what it was like to be without ready access to water. Participants were challenged to “turn off their taps” and share their experiences. In some cases, people documented how many times a day they reached for the water tap, flushed their toilets, did laundry, or washed dishes. Others shared personal experiences such as dealing with the drought in California. It didn’t take long to discover how much we depend on water! The word cloud below speaks volumes about some of those responses. Counting just tweets alone, WWEMA calculated that the campaign reached over 870,000 people.
Building on this Challenge, WWEMA members heard from a number of experts during the Washington Forum, including Claudia Copeland of the Congressional Research Service, who provided insights into the power change in Congress and what it will likely mean for appropriations, environmental legislation, and infrastructure financing. Like many in Congress and others, WWEMA continues to support increased funding for the state revolving loan funds (SRF) as well as funding for the WIFIA program that the U.S. EPA is creating through a $2.2 million FY-15 appropriation. The WIFIA program is designed to address funding for projects needing more than $20 million and that are of a regional or national significance. While not in the FY-16 President’s Budget, there is support for seeking funding for this program, which is intended to supplement the traditional SRF programs that tend to fund much smaller projects. EPA is also busy creating a new Water Infrastructure and Resiliency Finance Center, as recently announced by Vice President Biden. The Interim EPA Director Raffael Stein spoke to WWEMA members about the Center, which is an outgrowth of the “Build America” initiative. The Center will likely pull together a host of funding partners to increase efficiency and will increase funding support for EPA’s network of university-based environmental finance centers that work directly with communities with infrastructure needs. The priority here seems to be on small- and medium-sized communities. Stormwater and green infrastructure will also be a focus to improve community resiliency.
In addition to federal funding, many in the water sector are looking more closely at private funding as a way to help pay for needed improvements. WWEMA is a member of the Sustainable Water Infrastructure Coalition (SWIC), which has been working on removing volume caps for water and wastewater projects using private activity bonds. H.R. 499, the Sustainable Water Infrastructure Investment Act of 2015, was once again introduced in the House by Reps. John Duncan (R-TN) and Bill Pascrell (D-NJ), and SWIC is working to identify senators to introduce a companion bill in the Senate. The National Association of Water Companies (NAWC) is also working this issue and WWEMA has joined their stakeholder efforts as well.
Interest in public-private partnerships (P3s) and the role they might play in bringing private equity to the water market is also growing. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce held a meeting last year to begin exploring opportunities to access the enormous reserves in public retirement accounts and to discuss how these funds might be invested in the water industry.
Improvements in how quickly technologies can be approved and brought to market is another key factor in reducing utility costs and promoting infrastructure investment. The historic state-by-state paradigm of pilot testing and approval is slow and costly. New resources need to be brought to the table, such as a national database where projects and technologies can be stored and accessed by utilities making treatment decisions and states approving plans and specifications. Sharing knowledge and reducing the amount of time to get technologies to communities can reduce the cost of capital and make projects happen faster. A number of different organizations including Isle Inc. and WEF’s Leaders Innovation Forum for Technology (LIFT) program are working to support these efforts. I would be remiss, however, if I did not note that even long-established, successful technologies need to be part of this discussion. While “innovation” is a catchy buzz word, our long-established technologies also continue to innovate and should be an integral part of the technology discussion. WWEMA members also heard from Bob Salvatelli of Sustainable Water, which is working with universities, hospitals, and large water end-users to promote on-site water reuse to reduce municipal water use, decrease energy costs, and fund projects through water purchase agreements.
From an equipment technology manufacturer’s perspective, while these initiatives are critical as are new EPA regulations that drive treatment, there seems to be an ever widening gap between the documented infrastructure need and the will to pay for these improvements. It seems that money can be brought to the table — so why isn’t it being used? At the end of the day, it ultimately falls to the will of the municipality or utility to take on these infrastructure projects. Whether a system is small, medium, or large, funding can be made available — so what’s stopping us? In many cases I think it is the nature of public utilities and the elected government structure that does not want to raise rates, taxes, etc. So … what if all water systems were regulated as a public utility under the various state public utility commissions and services? Would we see spending and needed infrastructure projects get off the ground if utilities had mandates to provide services in full compliance and a way to require funding those improvements through an outside regulatory process? Just a thought worth considering…
Vanessa Leiby is the Executive Director of the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association founded in 1908 to represent the interest of water and wastewater technology manufacturers.