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EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

detroitnews.com

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Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#151

Post by paulmd »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102
rayiner wrote: post #66

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure. Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even ma…

> Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the pop…

> The cost of the water system ... [is] proportional to the population size...

Absolutely not - unless you assume every municipal area has equal population density.

You figure water pipe installation costs per mile. There are a lot more miles to get to people's houses in Podunk Nebraska. Overall - trivially disprovable.

> The ... ability to take on debt [is] directly proportional to the population size.

Absolutely not. Trivially disprovable. Compare tax revenue per-capita between Podunk Nebraska and New York City and see what you come up with. And then figure that out over the actual cost to deploy services to that population. Density of tax revenue per square mile is orders of magnitude lower.

Pro tip here: Podunk Nebraska doesn't have water service. They don't have sewer service. They have a well and a septic field, buddy. Because there isn't revenue to provide real services.

I lived in that growing up - and you don't have an accurate picture of what rural life is like at all. We had well water and septic, just like anyone who lived within 5 miles of us.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#152

Post by paulmd »

rayiner wrote: post #117
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the pop…

> If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them. Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk. Michigan as a whole is struggling, but as recently as 2000 it's per-capita GSP was at the national average, compared to places like Detroit and Flint where the bottom dropped out decades ago.

Buoyed by Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Bloomfield Hills.

As with every state - the urban areas by and large provide the tax revenue.

With Michigan, the Detroit City Center is mostly a trainwreck. There are still strong metro areas, and in particular there is a buttload of money flowing into the U of M area from overseas.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#153

Post by patrickaljord »

rayiner wrote: post #66

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure. Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even ma…

Or maybe just privatize it? In France (one of the most socialist country on Earth) we've been privatizing more and more of our water infrastructure (we're around 30% private by now and it increases each year) and the quality of water is still one of the best.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#154

Post by paulmd »

rmason wrote: post #107
Spooky23 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They overstate this stuff, all of the time. My wife was a finance director at a municipal water utility in an old city. Water supply infrastructure wasn't a ticking timebomb -- many pipes last literally centuries, and utilities can proactively use sensors and robots to find weak pipes to repair without digging up half the city. They had a capital program that worked, lines were replaced based on risk and there was a…

They already are being charged and sentenced. They will pay for the crime if you count probation for those in charge; http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/flint-water-c...

The people in charge will never pay.

The investigation says that the crime goes right to the bottom - random people in the MDEQ who did their jobs and didn't rock the boat.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#155

Post by jahaja »

bmelton wrote: post #97
blurbleblurble wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only things I'm missing are the points from the downvotes I keep getting in this thread. See, the thing here is that you and I are operating with completely different definitions of the word "value". I'm insisting to you that clean water is intrinsically valuable. Yet you impose a restriction on the supposedly free market, claiming that: "a job rebuilding the infrastructure of an area is only valuable if there ar…

Clean water is only valuable if someone can get for it greater than what it costs to extract. The aspect you're missing isn't a definition of value, but a model of sustainability. If there's industry enough in an area that there is some other way to pay for water extraction, production, cleaning (see Nevada) -- then water can be sold at a loss because it supports something else, and is sustainable so long as there a…

> Economics are true whether or not your ideology agrees

This is not true. Hence the old name Political economy. There's no such thing as objective economics - much to the annoyance of usually libertarians.

And to add to this discussion there's no way that this would happen and not be fixed where I live no matter the profitability of the municipality itself. If the municipality couldn't pay for it, the state would. And the sustainability, or "is it worth it? profitable?", question would barely come up because access to clean water is culturally deemed more or less a right.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#156

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

patrickaljord wrote: post #153
rayiner wrote: post #66

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure. Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even ma…

Or maybe just privatize it? In France (one of the most socialist country on Earth) we've been privatizing more and more of our water infrastructure (we're around 30% private by now and it increases each year) and the quality of water is still one of the best.

And how much do you pay for it?

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#157

Post by polack »

d--b wrote: post #147
dmode wrote: post #21

Good thing this was approved by the previous administration. The next Flint will most likely receive a tank to protect itself from rioters, given the EPA cuts and further bloated defense budget

Flint is the symbol of mid-West's de-industrialization. Since this administration has vowed to give these people's jobs back, you can be sure that they're going to make sure Flint is better off in 4 years than it is now. So giving them federal money to fix their water pipes is a great way to be the good guys. They're going to be able to hire a bunch of people to fix it, and solve a health problem at the same time. I'…

I think you have missed the fact that this money was given during the Obama administration. Since Trump have cut funding to the EPA it's hard to believe that all the "Flints" out there will have it better after 4 years...

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#158

Post by ThrustVectoring »

rayiner wrote: post #66

This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure. Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even ma…

The subsidy isn't going to be from rich residents to poor ones. It's going to be from urban cores to the suburbs. Spread out a bunch of people over a large area, and there's much more pipe per capita.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#159

Post by candiodari »

rmason wrote: post #107
Spooky23 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They overstate this stuff, all of the time. My wife was a finance director at a municipal water utility in an old city. Water supply infrastructure wasn't a ticking timebomb -- many pipes last literally centuries, and utilities can proactively use sensors and robots to find weak pipes to repair without digging up half the city. They had a capital program that worked, lines were replaced based on risk and there was a…

They already are being charged and sentenced. They will pay for the crime if you count probation for those in charge; http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/flint-water-c...

The punishment is that if he poisons another set of kids within a year, she gets a higher sentence. Also her job search will be complicated for a year.

Yeah. That'll show them.

The only solution is to make monitoring the responsibility of people who are impacted. Distribute water quality testing kits that, first, clearly and easily show their results, and can then be mailed to a federal agency. Good luck avoiding those results.

Re: EPA gives Flint $100M to help repair pipes

#160

Post by adventured »

polack wrote: post #157
d--b wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Flint is the symbol of mid-West's de-industrialization. Since this administration has vowed to give these people's jobs back, you can be sure that they're going to make sure Flint is better off in 4 years than it is now. So giving them federal money to fix their water pipes is a great way to be the good guys. They're going to be able to hire a bunch of people to fix it, and solve a health problem at the same time. I'…

I think you have missed the fact that this money was given during the Obama administration. Since Trump have cut funding to the EPA it's hard to believe that all the "Flints" out there will have it better after 4 years...

EPA 2016 budget: $8.16 billion

How many Flints were you planning to repair with the minuscule discretionary part of that?

The EPA has never had the budget required to build and rebuild hundreds of billions in infrastructure.

The "Flints" in the US will be better off when the US starts focusing on infrastructure as a critical spending necessity again.

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