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 is free you’re just paying for the cost to get the free water to you.
Drill a well on your property. Drilling the well isn’t free you have to pay for it.
The water already belongs to you so it’s free.
Want to get your free water out of your well, unless you want to pull it up by hand, you need to buy a pump.
Then you need to buy a tank to hold your free water, then you have to buy and install pipes to get your free water to your house so you can use it.
Use and electric pump to get your free water out of the ground and to your house you get to pay an electric bill each month.
Turns out free water isn’t so free is it.
Cut off their water would be bad. Cut off their 40 oz malt liquors would be an outrage.
look bud, I pay premium prices for everything and I work every day, sometimes all weekend and holidays too
I am talking about common decency for those who refuse to work
Well, fill in the blank on the "________ justice" thingy. It seems whatever someone doesn't get for free is subject to this approach.
But even more disconcerting is the tendency of late to appeal, not to a governmental entity within our nation, but the UN (a REAL hotbed of corruption and injustice) for "justice".
Enough of this sh*t. The UN has no jurisdiction here, and never should have. Get the US out of that pit of corruption.
Man...you can’t fix stupid or inbred...don’t waste your time trying to reason with idiots. Life’s too short!
Which is exactly what they want - and expect.
Is this what you meant to say as it makes absolutely NO sense!
IMR 4350 is exactly corrent, real rights do not include having free stuff delivered to your household.
Or was this sarcasm?
“I am talking about common decency for those who refuse to work”
They refuse to work, you can work for them, after all that’s the decent thing to do.
no I meant what I said
Then they should have been collected years ago. Where did the system break down? Why wait until now to do something about it?
I know there are no simple answers and no easy solutions.
Well, I guess that I am just dense because I don't understand that phrase - please explain it to me.
yeah it’s self explanatory
do I think bums should work?
yes
but that doesn’t make them work
Come to Oregon. ..we get charged for the water falling on our property...oh...and our green government does NOT count water providing electricity as a “renewable resource”
But that places no burden upon me to care for them but knock YOURSELF out if you wish.
Enough food and water to sustain life
minimal housing and medical care
Due process before deprivation of life liberty property
pursuit of life liberty and property
These two things contradict each other. If I am forced to provide some one else food, water, housing, and medical care with my labor then that is slavery and you are violating my rights to life and liberty.
The new standard.
Just claim giving someone that’s too lazy to work “free stuff” is the decent thing to do and everything becomes free when everyone quits working.
Just where do we get the free stuff to give to people that are too lazy to work if everyone that’s too lazy to work gets free stuff because they are too lazy to work?
Just how did this country get to a point where people believe people that are too lazy to work are entitled to “free stuff” simple because they are too lazy to work?
Dear Democrat voters of Detroit:
“Elections have consequences.”
You kept electing Democrats, and now, you can’t afford water. This is known as “Cause And Effect”.
Sounds like a 3rd World country. This makes sense. Detriot has a 3rd World population with 3rd World ways and 3rd World problems. They can only capable of creating 3rd World conditions. They can not maintain the 1st World infrastructure that the 1st World people built there years ago.
It they didn't receive boatloads of taxpayer money from outside the city it would collapse completely back into wilderness. The remaining residents would live exactly like their ancestors did.
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