Posted on 06/24/2014 5:30:34 AM PDT by SJackson
Detroit: How the Left Made Water More Expensive Than Cell Phones
Posted By Arnold Ahlert On June 24, 2014 @ 12:56 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 2 Comments
The latest news from Detroit, the poster child for failed progressive policies that have dominated that city for more than a half-century, is not good. In March of 2014, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department (DWSD) announced it would begin cutting off water service for customers at least 60 days overdue or more than $150 behind in their water bill payments. Activists outraged by the decision have taken their case outside the city—all the way to the United Nations.
The DWSD has targeted 1,500 to 3,000 business and residential customers every week as part of a get-tough approach that would enable them to begin recouping the $118 million owed from delinquent accounts. Accounts that comprise nearly half the city’s total number. As a result, the Department has shut off water service to more than 7,500 properties in the past two months alone.
“We really don’t want to shut off anyone’s water, but it’s really our duty to go after those who don’t pay, because if they don’t pay then our other customers pay for them,” said DWSD spokeswoman Curtrise Garner. “That’s not fair to our other customers.” Garner also noted that the city has programs that help those “totally in need,” but that many of the customers who can afford to pay their bills don’t bother, “and we know this because, once we shut water off, the next day they are in paying the bill in full. So we do know that that has become a habit as well,” she contended.
It’s not the only habit of non-payment afflicting Detroit. In 2012, it was revealed that almost half of the city’s 305,000 property owners failed to pay their tax bills the previous year.
Yet the thousands of families who no longer have access to water, along with those who will shortly follow, has generated a backlash by a coalition of leftist organizations striving for “water justice,” including the Detroit People’s Water Board, the Blue Planet Project, the Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and Food & Water Watch. They have submitted a report to Catarina de Albuquerque, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, calling on that organization to intervene. “What we see is a violation of the human right to water,” said Meera Karunananthan, an international campaigner with the Blue Planet Project. “The U.S. has international obligations in terms of people’s right to water, and this is a blatant violation of that right. We’re hoping the U.N. will put pressure on the federal government and the state of Michigan to do something about it.”
The groups have framed the argument in typically leftist terms, accusing the DWSD of attempting to rid itself of low-income customers in an effort to spur a private takeover of the utility. DWSD has denied the charge, but city officials are considering at least a partial takeover by private entities as one of a variety of strategies aimed at reducing the $18 billion of debt that has driven Detroit into bankruptcy. The DWSD accounts for $5 billion of that debt, and as of March, 150,806 out of the 323,900 DWSD accounts in the city were delinquent.
Detroit did attempt to integrate its water system with the water systems in the suburban counties of Oakland, Macomb and Wayne, hoping to create a jointly managed regional authority in return for a $47-million-per-year minimum lease payment. But the deal fell through when those counties wanted no part of the DWSD’s debt, its delinquent customers, or an aging infrastructure “with a history of disinvestment,” according to the Detroit Free Press.
Despite that disinvestment, Detroit has seen a steady rise in its water bills, including a staggering 119 percent increase over the last decade. The average water bill is now an outrageous $75 a month, compared to national average of $40. For perspective sake, the average cell phone bill is $71 per month.
Nonetheless, as recently as last week the Detroit City Council approved an 8.7 percent increase in DWSD rates expected to add an average of more than $5 per month to the current bills. Council President Brenda Jones cited infrastructure repair as the reason for the hike. “I do realize that in order to get the repairs done to our system, it’s going to take a lot of money to get those repairs because our system is very old,” Jones said.
The activists are apoplectic, claiming those affected were given no time to prepare for a shut off and that some accounts were suspended prior to the deadline. “Sick people are left without running water and running toilets,” writes Blue Planet Project Founder and Food & Water Watch Board Chair Maude Barlow.
People recovering from surgery cannot wash and change bandages. Children cannot bathe and parents cannot cook. Is this a small number of victims? No. The water department has decreed that it will turn the water off to all 120,000 residences that owe it money by the end of the summer although it has made no such threat to the many corporations and institutions that are in arrears on their bills as well. How did it come to this?
Unsurprisingly, Barlow blames “decades of market driven neoliberal policy that put business and profit ahead of public good.” A less delusional examination reveals the usual suspects: free-spending, progressive Democrats, allied with labor unions.
Beginning in 1962, Detroit elected an unbroken string of Democratic mayors and other city officials determined to impose a progressive agenda on a city that was once the richest, per capita, in the entire nation. Democrats oversaw the failed the “Model City” program, fashioned after Soviet Union centralized efforts to transform entire urban areas at once. They were in control when the riots of 1967 destroyed black businesses and drove more than 140,000 people from the city. They bestowed outlandish salaries, benefit packages, and highly inefficient work rules on city unions, a move largely responsible for driving the city’s mainstay auto industry to right-to-work states. And they were responsible for a series of corruption scandals, culminating in a 28-year prison term for former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick.
All of it led to the largest municipal bankruptcy in the history of the nation, in June of 2013.
And make no mistake: DWSD workers were an integral part of the problem. As recently as 2012, the DWSD employed a full-time horseshoer collecting $56,245 in salary and benefits — despite the inconvenient reality that the department had no horses. They also had 257 separate job classifications designed to maximize the number of workers required to do even the simplest of tasks — workers whose average compensation packages came to $86,000 in 2013.
2012 was also the year when an independent report concluded that the city could slash the staffing levels at DWSD by 81 percent, due to the reality that it was using twice the number of employees per gallon as cities like Chicago. In response, John Riehl, president of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) Local 207 that represents many of the DWSD employees, told the Detroit Free Press the department needed more workers.
When the Detroit Board of Water Commissioners approved the cutbacks, 950 DWSD workers went on strike in October 2012, defying a restraining order issued by a federal judge in the process. The strike lasted five days, and Riehl declared it a victory “because it has set the precedent that unions, the community and the City of Detroit can stand up against the whole array of powers-that-be and win.”
In light of Detroit’s eventual bankruptcy, it was a temporary and Pyrrhic victory.
Today, Detroit is a city with an unemployment rate of more than 14 percent, and a poverty rate of about 40 percent, courtesy of the very same Democratic social engineering that has driven water to unaffordable levels for many of the city’s poorest residents. Even more telling, given that Detroit’s population is 82.7 percent black, this crisis disproportionately afflicts the very same minorities Democrats claim to be protecting and nurturing.
“The case of water cut-offs in the City of Detroit speaks to the deep racial divides and intractable economic and social inequality in access to services within the United States,” claim the activists taking their case to the United Nations. No, it doesn’t. It speaks to 52 years of progressive Democratic policies that have destroyed the city formerly known as the “arsenal of democracy.” The very same policies these leftist groups would exacerbate in their quixotic quest for UN-sponsored “water justice.”
The water became more expensive than phones when Obama started giving the doggone things away. ObamaPhones.
I recall that one summer, during the early years of the Clinton administration, there was a bad heat wave in the south, and Congress passes a bill to help poor people by air conditioners...wonder how that turned out..
Water should be free up to a certain usage amount. Meter it and charge those who use above a certain amount per cubic foot.
In this case, they should just cancel all unpaid balances, readjust the rates and start over.
Too messed up to fix.
If you ever look at the employment history of city public authorities, you would be amazed at the corruption and flat out theft. By theft, I mean putting people on the payroll at inflated salaries to do nothing. And then there is the issue of floating authority “utility” bonds with the revenue going into the general account to be spent on God knows what. Or spent on dubious utility projects like “green” bike trails or solar projects. The whole system stinks and its no wonder it is collapsing. The end result is customers left holding the bag with water rates being jacked up to 5 or 10 times the rates of surrounding communities.
well you know what? I think humans have a right to enough water to drink and bathe. They don’t have a right to enough water to run a power plant or irrigate a farm, just enough for personal use. A right. Like air to breathe. Water used to cost a little for having been put through the cleaning process.
Now it costs an arm and a leg.
Here are the things I think humans have a right to:
Free speech
Religion
Enough food and water to sustain life
minimal housing and medical care
Self defense
Due process before deprivation of life liberty property
pursuit of life liberty and property
all the rest is gravy
Al Sharpton did a segment on this with a black activist from Detroit and their take on this was ludicrous.
She blamed the Koch brothers for this water problem, its was them soaking the poor for more $$$. Not kidding.
She also mentioned automation taking away Detroit's residents jobs. This is a ironic as Sharptons prior segment was about how the GOP cant get women votes because they wont go along with Obama’s call for more employer mandates, paid leave, child care, etc.
Their fans must be completely clueless.
You forgot the /s, right?
We need Obama water, like we have Obama phones for flash mob kids and drug dealers. The kids need water.
LAMENTATIONS 5:3-5
3 We have become fatherless,
our mothers are widows.
4 We must buy the water we drink;
our wood can be had only at a price.
5 Those who pursue us are at our heels;
we are weary and find no rest.
Yeah, our right to FREE water. Maybe the UN will step in and force bankrupt Detroit to turn that water back on.
Apparently they don't know where clean water comes from.
Note that Dems/libs have ruled that place for many many decades bankrupting it, now they are blaming the Koch brothers and crying to the UN.
Okay, let's substitute a few words in there for water:
Gasoline should be free...
Food should be free...
Housing should be free...
Automobiles should be free...
Get my point?
In this case, they should just cancel all unpaid balances, readjust the rates and start over.
Who is "they"?
The gooberment?
Who's gonna maintain the infrastructure?
My tax money, even though I live 900 miles from the cesspool?
Or would you have those that "use above a certain amount" pay for those oh, so poor folks below them?
Perhaps we can get some advice on this problem from Karl Marx.
No one has the right to the fruits of another’s labors.
No, I did not. I am not a leftist. But really, most cities won’t even let you have a personal well even if you can. So a simple small fee for normal water usage for a family should be the norm and a charge per cubic foot for those using above a certain amount.
Although most of the bills are for sewage rather than water. Water treatment and supply can be expensive. What is the alternative? Move out of the city.
In this particular case, the city was outright raping the taxpayers as is indicated with the $56,000 a year salary for a horseshoer.
Scrap this system and start over. Detroit is toast, in bankruptcy anyway. I don’t know how anyone could support going after these unpaid bills when the bills were unfair in the first place.
This is not your normal situation.
I am talking about the basics to live
----
The average water bill is now an outrageous $75 a month, compared to national average of $40. For perspective sake, the average cell phone bill is $71 per month.
I don't know where they get their numbers to squawk about $75 dollars a month. That's what we pay...and there is no sewer or garbage attached to it.
Most people don't have cell phones, they have portable entertainment centers. The family kids me about how they have smart phones, but I have a stupid phone. All it does is make phone calls...... and costs $7 a month.
----
Who taught these people to budget?
yeah those phones aren’t all that and a slice of bread, I work with parents in the court system and even with those phones you can’t reach them because they are out of minutes. More minutes can be bought.
Put a free faucet on every street corner, & tell them either pay up or collect their water on the street.
It's your normal democrat run situation.
Amnesty, whether for unpaid bills or illegal alien attackers, is ALWAYS a bad idea.
These overdue accounts are owed by people who have money(either from work or more likely from welfare) that they were supposed to use to pay for their cost of living. They refused to pay for the things they needed. Since they caused the problem by stealing the water, let them die of thirst until they pay what they owe.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.
