The Gold Plating of American Water (worksinprogress.co)
- Reference: 0180634170
- News link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/26/01/21/1922232/the-gold-plating-of-american-water
- Source link: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-gold-plating-of-american-water/
Since the Clean Water Act of 1972 and the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974, the U.S. has spent approximately $5 trillion in contemporary dollars fighting water pollution -- about 0.8% of annual GDP across that period. The EPA itself admits that surface water regulations are the one category of environmental rules where estimated costs exceed estimated benefits.
New York City was required to build a filtration plant to address two minor parasites in water from its Croton aqueduct. The project took a decade longer than expected and cost $3.2 billion, more than double the original estimate. After the plant opened in 2015, the city's Commissioner of Environmental Protection noted that the water would basically be "the same" to the public. Jefferson County, Alabama, meanwhile, descended into what was then the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history in 2011 after EPA-mandated sewer upgrades pushed its debt from $300 million to over $3 billion.
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-gold-plating-of-american-water/
Re:Two Words. "Toxic Empathy" (Score:4, Funny)
they have a forum just for you
[1]im14andthisisdeep [reddit.com]
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/im14andthisisdeep/
Re:Two Words. "Toxic Empathy" (Score:4, Insightful)
> So's opening the gates at the border and saying 'no one's illegal!'
How would you classify allowing the CIA and DOD to use a nearby continent as their personal playground, conducting (or sometimes just supporting) coups to overthrow governments and creating chaos, then telling the people whose lives we fucked up that they can't come to the country where we keep all the wealth we looted from their home nation?
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Business as usual!
The Monroe Doctrine, the Roosevelt Corollary and now the Trump Corollary. With very brief pauses in intervention, the US just can't keep its mitts out of South and Central American treasure.
Re:Two Words. "Toxic Empathy" (Score:4, Interesting)
Teacher here... rule with cold hard facts is a beginner's mistake. So is being too empathic. When dealing with lots of people, things easily become complicated. Simple binary thinking is just not adequate. That is why in social sciences, there are only pros and cons. Very uncomfortable for some people. A process of acceptance may be needed. Cheers!
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Sorry, but it's not "there are only pros and cons". It's rather "it depends on exactly what your goals are" and "the methods that usually seem to work". ("The methods that work" would require a lot better models than we have...probably better data, too.)
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"There are no solutions, only trade-offs"
-Thomas Sowell
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> Rule with cold hard facts, not feels.
Wanting clean water is now "toxic empathy"? Clean water is a basic human right; empathy has nothing to do with it.
> So's not clearing your brush and deadwood in California because it may impact some bird.
Yes, birds are important to the ecosystem. Without birds, pests can run rampant. Regardless, clearing brush will not stop the wildfire problem (https://www.npr.org/2025/02/11/nx-s1-5270034/los-angeles-fires-risk-brush-chaparral-trump). You wanted only the facts, right?
> So's opening the gates at the border and saying 'no one's illegal!'
Yes, there's nothing illegal about a person. Almost everyone who is in the U.S. illegally entered legally and overstayed their v
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By the genie being out of the bottle he meant the inmates are out of the asylum...and he's referring to himself.
Re: Two Words. "Toxic Empathy" (Score:2)
> Regardless, clearing brush will not stop the wildfire problem
What? Because it won't "stop" the wildfire problem we choose to not clear brush in California forests? It's not enough that it *might* reduce the severity of wildfires? If it won't stop them all we won't take any action?
This is the same brilliant logic that had one political party refusing to do anything to moderate immigration in the last administration because we failed to craft a comprehensive solution to immigration issues? That said we couldn't put up a wall along the border because it wouldn't end all
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If you clear out some of the underbrush, worse, more flammable stuff often shows up to replace it:
"Frequent burns also leave the landscape vulnerable to invasive grasses, which move in quickly and displace native plants. After the 2018 Woolsey Fire, the National Park Service found that areas that burned had an 8 percent increase in invasive species. Over multiple fires, native chaparral shrubs get sparser. The invasive grasses that take over are even more flammable than chaparral, leading to an even grea
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Building homes with more flame-resistant materials is one of the best strategies, but that is only useful in new builds and requires significant (costly) regulations...
"Homes that are built from fire-resistant materials also fare better in wildfires, as was seen in the Los Angeles fires. Replacing wood roofs and using non-combustible siding is key"
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"Downmod me all you want."
And you will never get as much as you deserve.
"The sense that America jumped the shark is now quickly spreading..."
Because we have an administration that thinks like you do.
Never Ending Inflation (Score:5, Interesting)
In 2017 NYC opened a brand new 400 square foot public bathroom in a public park in Brooklyn. It cost $2 million. That's roughly $5000 a square foot. You could walk across the street and purchase a larger home for a quarter of that price. Nobody can account for it's cost. The official response is - shrug, yeah stuff costs a lot.
It should be an ongoing, continuous, strictly enforced law that any project over a few hundred thousand needs an independent audit conducted. A 10% cost overrun is understandable. A 200%-400% cost overrun is criminal. It happens all the time, continuously, everywhere.
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I don't understand why things are not more transparent. I would like a breakdown of what dollar goes into who's pocket for what service and why.
Re:Never Ending Inflation (Score:5, Insightful)
You know exactly why things are not more transparent -- because we keep electing the people who have a vested interest in keeping things hidden. But what are you going to do - vote for the other party?
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For NYC we need to check back in a year as that is the type of issue that Mamdani campaigned on working on. He already is starting to lessen the rules for small businesses.
2017 DeBlasio was mayor and after him New Yorker's did in fact vote for the "other" party and elected Adams who then turned around to be the most corrupt mayor since the 80's (and Giuliani and Bloomberg both ran as R candidates) so it's not pure partisanship at issue.
[1]https://www.thecity.nyc/2019/0... [thecity.nyc]
NYC Parks Advocates’ Geoffrey Cr
[1] https://www.thecity.nyc/2019/04/04/no-relief-as-pricey-park-bathrooms-put-pressure-on-taxpayers/
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You just watch. Mamdani met with plenty of rich people behind the scenes and they ALL came away with the same conclusion: we're gonna be fine, it's ok.
Mamdani comes from money. He's just playing the game right.
Re:Never Ending Inflation (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think you could find a new-construction anything in New York City for $500k. You can buy an older 400sq ft apartment for about that, but it will come with substantial annual fees. $2 million will get you a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood, but nothing at all fancy by national standards. A friend of mine who made it big on Wall Street spent well into the 8 figures on an Upper Eastside brownstone. It's smaller and less fancy than your average $500k McMansion in Texas. Long story short, any sort of real estate or construction is extremely pricy in New York, and it doesn't require any sort of fraud or mismanagement for those costs to balloon.
An independent audit might stop some fraud, but it would further push up the costs and add to red tape in the end because now you need to account for the cost of the auditors (likely $50-100k for any major audit firm). The auditors aren't going to be able to tell you whether the plumber was too expensive. All they can do is trace where the money went to make sure nobody was embezzling. And on a small engagement, they probably aren't going to dig all that hard.
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> It should be an ongoing, continuous, strictly enforced law that any project over a few hundred thousand needs an independent audit conducted. A 10% cost overrun is understandable. A 200%-400% cost overrun is criminal. It happens all the time, continuously, everywhere.
I'm not saying that mandatory audits are bad, but I have a couple questions on this proposal: (1) How many auditors would this require? Who hires, trains, pays for them? (2) how much would those auditors cost, both in absolute terms, and in the "per-project burden/tax'"to pay for the auditing of the contract? (3) who will take action on the results of any audit, since you're describing a 'forensic audit' that explains how much money has already been spent?
In government contracting, I've seen a lot of ma
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They are. I've done it.
The problem is, the auditors aren't allowed to blow the whistle and enforce consequences. Someone important is siphoning off money? ooooh nooo that might be a bad headline for NYS, so let's brush it under the table!!
If we blew out even HALF of the bureaucratic sludge from NYS pork contracts we could have a utopia in the city and upstate. But fat asses need more padding, apparently.
Misrepresentation of EPA findings? (Score:2)
If you dig into the linked reports, the EPA says that the current surface water regulation costs exceed current benefits, but they argue that "potential risks should be treated as probable ones." It sounds to me like they are admitting that current costs are higher than existing benefits because the problems they are designed to mitigate aren't extant now. But they *could* be in the future, so it's better to be set up to deal with it in advance rather than wait until it's an issue that we have to address a
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The problem with that logic though is the definition of "might be a problem" turning to "requiring a fix". Anything might be a problem. It's all fine and dandy to be proactive about water management when it definitely has public health concerns attached to it, but a few of the stated examples appear at face value to have been extreme. And really the question is who gets to draw the line between requiring a fix for a "might be" and not requiring it? If the EPA has that unilateral decision making, then th
$3.2 billion for exactly the same water (Score:2)
[1]LINK [worksinprogress.co]: “The city was required to build a new plant. By the time the plant opened in 2015, it had taken a decade longer than expected and its cost more than doubled from its original estimate, to $3.2 billion.”
“The city’s Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection noted that although the investments were massive, to the public the water would basically be ‘the same’. Infections from the two microscopic parasites the EPA was attempting to address were high
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-gold-plating-of-american-water/
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> [1]LINK [worksinprogress.co]: “The city was required to build a new plant. By the time the plant opened in 2015, it had taken a decade longer than expected and its cost more than doubled from its original estimate, to $3.2 billion.”
> “The city’s Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection noted that although the investments were massive, to the public the water would basically be ‘the same’. Infections from the two microscopic parasites the EPA was attempting to address were higher after the plants opened.”
So, is the conclusion that (1) the wrong solution was chosen or (2) the originally identified problem wasn't really a problem? Obviously the latter implies the former.
The really big question is whether the idea that "surface water regulations are the one category of environmental rules where estimated costs exceed estimated benefits" is true for all cases, for some cases, or for a small number of cases. The unwritten implication for non-skeptical readers is that it's true for all cases, but that's a very
[1] https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-gold-plating-of-american-water/
Yeah, it's a "minor" problem until (Score:5, Insightful)
You are the one who has to deal with the problem. All you have to do is look at Flint to see why it costs so much: We've spent decades ignoring our water system in large swaths of the country so that now we're playing catch up. Look at how many cities still have lead service lines.
Thank God! (Score:2)
Do you know how difficult it is to exactly hit the mark on safety? Do you know easy it is to miss detecting a dangerous chemical, bacteria, virus, or fungus?
If the companies are not complaining about our protection requirements being excessive that can only mean they are ineffective.
There is no perfection - doing exactly what is known to be necessary means we are not doing enough to protect against the unknown dangers.
Everyone I know would rather spend more money on water than electricity.
Most people - in
Nope not water (Score:2)
Nope. The big bucks is not in water, it's in the sewer. That's why they lumped them together. Around here this town of ~90,000 had to spend like $100M to improve sewer plant outflow so that it was cleaner than the water coming down the river from upstream of the outfall.
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> Around here this town of ~90,000 had to spend like $100M to improve sewer plant outflow so that it was cleaner than the water coming down the river from upstream of the outfall.
Do you consider that a good thing or a bad thing?
One other contributor (Score:5, Interesting)
It's easy to point to the NYC plant as an example. The whole article reads like a libertarian hit piece "regulation is da evillll! We're so oppressed. Government can't do anything right."
I wonder though: how much of the increased cost is due to genuine improvements and maintenance?
It is worth noting that urban decay in the 70s, 80s, and 90s led to a huge backlog of deferred maintenance. (That, and human laziness in general.) We're constantly hearing stories along the lines of "a water main dating to the 1800s burst....It was never meant to hold up to this." Today lots of cities are painfully (and expensively) working through that backlog, either because leaks/breakage have forced the issue, or because they're finally realizing that those pipes in the ground were never meant to last forever.
We're also hearing stories about how storm sewers overflowing cause sewage plants to overflow into waterways. This used to just be accepted practice ("well shit...it's shit!"). Now, because we'd like to actually be able to use our rivers without catching e coli , and because climate change makes downpours more common, municipalities are starting to separate storm sewers from sanitary sewers.
Speaking for myself, my household water bill is never more than $50/mo. (It was about $30/mo until recently, when the city took out a massive bond to...replace all the old pipes, upgrade the treatment plant, and better manage storm water.) For every one of me, there's some household spending 3x as much each month to average $100/mo. Who is using that much water?!
Still, in my opinion, worth every penny. I've been to places where you couldn't drink the water, and places with no indoor plumbing at all. I really don't mind paying for what I've got.
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> It's easy to point to the NYC plant as an example. The whole article reads like a libertarian hit piece "regulation is da evillll! We're so oppressed. Government can't do anything right."
> Speaking for myself, my household water bill is never more than $50/mo. (It was about $30/mo until recently, when the city took out a massive bond to...replace all the old pipes, upgrade the treatment plant, and better manage storm water.) For every one of me, there's some household spending 3x as much each month to average $100/mo. Who is using that much water?!
I would love to be paying $50/month for water. I am currently paying more than twice that, and that's for using under 4 CCF per month for a family and a yard. Our usage is insanely low, but I pay $84/month just to have a connection to the city water system here. I agree that costs rise partly due to government regulation, partly for deferred maintenance, and partly for new requirements. I'll add a couple other things: employee retirement plans and greedy investors. Our Public Utilities Commission seems
Re:One other contributor (Score:4, Informative)
> The whole article reads like a libertarian hit piece
I thought the same thing, so I did a quick googling of the publisher. [1]Manhattan Institute [wikipedia.org] is a "a conservative, New York-based think tank focused on advancing free-market principles, individual liberty, and opportunity" So yeah, certainly a libertarian leaning source. To the rest of your point, I would tend to agree. Clean water to drink, and not dumping shit in the rivers when it rains is a pretty worthwhile investment. Like any other public service, of course there is room for improvement, but I have yet to hear a solution beyond "less regulation".
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manhattan_Institute_for_Policy_Research
Maintenance costs are real (Score:3)
The number of single family homes has grown about 70% since 1970.
I don't know what the average age of a sewer is before it needs it's first major repairs or upgrades, but 50 years doesn't seem improbable. Of course your running costs are going to be lower in the first 20-40 years. But the ground shifts, capacity needs upgrading, things fail etc. US population keeps growing, so more and more sewers will hit that magic 50 year mark (or whatever year you pick) where true Total Cost of Ownership becomes apparent. Europe is more expensive than the US, but their population began to stabilize in ~1985 and they've been paying the "sustainable" cost for many more years. The US will see the same result ~30 years after when the population begins to plateau.
Once again... (Score:3)
...the public is forced to pay the costs while private companies reap the profits. In my neck of the woods (Midwest, rural, lots of farming), farmers (both corporate and family) and their pigs dump nitrates and lots of other shit (literally) in the water and the public, who should dare to want to actually drink the water, are forced to pay the cost to clean it up.
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Pig-shit in the water? It's called a feckin-A FARM for good reason. 'Course pigs compete with ducks and geese to pollute water ... but I think swamp-plants & fish actually like it. If you don't like cleaning tasks native to out-door / farming life then move to Detroit and drink lead.
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"'Course pigs compete with ducks and geese to pollute water..."
Because farmers of course do nothing to protect the water for other users. It's the pig's fault!
"...but I think swamp-plants & fish actually like it."
And they're more important than humans! Or at least for the purposes of this conversation they are.
"If you don't like cleaning tasks native to out-door / farming life..."
Which are none because farmers are entitled to pollute, according to you.
Blame suburbia (Score:2)
It's not entirely surprising that the costs would double when suburbs keep being built with larger and larger homes on larger and larger plots. You're talking about more and more infrastructure needed to support the same number of consumers, and more energy needed to pump the water.
But what a surprise this article blames environmentalists. Because god-forbid the peasants have clean drinking water. Despite the rather obvious fact that blaming the EPA doesn't... hold water. You seriously think adding a millio
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"It's not entirely surprising that the costs would double when suburbs keep being built with larger and larger homes on larger and larger plots. You're talking about more and more infrastructure needed to support the same number of consumers, and more energy needed to pump the water."
What about this sentence do you not understand?: "...even though per-capita water use has actually decreased over that period."
Larger and larger homes do not require "more infrastructure", greater population density does. Larg
They demanded clean water? (Score:2)
Those bastards!
Which EPA? (Score:3, Informative)
"The EPA itself admits that surface water regulations are the one category of environmental rules where estimated costs exceed estimated benefits."
I'm not saying he's wrong or that the data he presents is flawed. It should be noted that a person complaining about the cost of regulation is the director of research and a senior fellow at The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research, which is an American 501 nonprofit conservative think tank. They want all forms of deregulation more than they want slavery for women.
Nobody drinks the water in the airplane bathroom. The EPA does however think it should be drinkable for some reason:
[1]https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/... [epa.gov]
[1] https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/aircraft-drinking-water-rule
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> Nobody drinks the water in the airplane bathroom.
It's more expensive to run a potable and non-potable water separately in an airplane bathroom. Yes absolutely people put it in their mouths. People brush their teeth in there, and yes you will find people drinking it too (even if you're not one of them).
It is a minimum expectation for all water sources available to be safe in an aircraft where it is dispensed to the general public.
Do you run a lead pipe specifically to your bathroom washbasin?
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"Nobody drinks the water in the airplane bathroom. "
How do you know this? I suspect you are wrong.
"The EPA does however think it should be drinkable for some reason:"
So do I, and probably virtually everyone who thinks about it.
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Because the alternative of having potentially contaminated water coming out of the a tap, whether it's in the bathroom or otherwise, is somehow better? The water coming out of the faucet in the bathroom came from the same tank and ran same through the same plumbing system as the water in your coffee. I'd prefer neither had e-coli in them.
Multiple issues .... (Score:3)
One problem I've encountered now in a couple different places I lived is old/failing infrastructure. In one small city (population 6,000-ish), they had a fancy, costly reverse-osmosis water filtration plant that met all the latest government regulations, but most homes still had water that ran a gross yellow/brown at random times of the year, or problems with low water pressure.
The water lines to homes were often around 100 years old, as well as the sewer system. Nobody had ever really budgeted for upgrading or replacing the sewers because residents *always* complained (even ousting one mayor who campaigned on modernizing it). They simply didn't want to be the ones stuck footing the bill for the whole thing, by way of higher monthly sewer or water bills. After all, water was still flowing and toilets were still flushing -- and there HAD to be some other way it would get done, right? And after the new treatment plant was mandated, bills went way up already.
Where I live now, the water bill is at least $150 a month or so for 2 adults and no kids (and we don't even water our lawns). We have a newer clothes washer that's supposed to use minimal water, too. They keep telling us a lot of funds are going to modernizing the sewer system, and I do see them tearing up roads all over town to replace pipes. So I feel like it's a bill that's unpleasant, but probably necessary to pay. The part that really kills us though is the hit we take on the electric bills. The house is all electric and built back in the 1940's -- so no insulation to speak of. Just brick behind plaster walls. In cold winter months, bills easily exceed $550-600. Already replaced every bulb in the place with low power LED bulbs, but I've been warned not to blow insulation in the walls or else risk mold/mildew problems, long-term. These old homes were designed assuming they could breathe more.
Portland's costly water filtration plant (Score:2)
[1]https://www.youtube.com/live/L... [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/live/LMTnG79eTRA?si=__cq2fXz_M7GbOeZ&t=37
How does one plate water? (Score:1)
Don't you need something to be a metal - an actual metal, not silicon or any semiconductor - before it can be "plated"? I get that water treatment has become horribly expensive, but how is that "plating water"?
Re:How does one plate water? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a specific jargon term in project management:
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_plating_(project_management)
How does one, explain.. (Score:2)
> Don't you need something to be a metal - an actual metal, not silicon or any semiconductor - before it can be "plated"? I get that water treatment has become horribly expensive, but how is that "plating water"?
I must admit, I’ve never really had a concern talking about enshittification and someone taking it a bit too literally.
Now I’m not sure I should have even mentioned the word.