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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

#101

Post by kakarot »

Spooky23 wrote: post #76
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…

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…

It's more abouy failed leadership than failed engineering. It has to do with how Flint spread responsibility over their water source so thin that no one was to blame and no one had the full picture. Laziness gave way to corruption. I'm sure there were protests from the engineering team.

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

#102

Post by AnthonyMouse »

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 population size. 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.

And as to the second point, it's not clear that the cities in such dire straits that they can't even pay for their own infrastructure are worth saving. Concentrated poverty is poisonous in general. It may make more sense to relocate the people in failed cities to other places than to spend billions of dollars bailing them out every year until the end of time.

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

#104

Post by blurbleblurble »

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…

I hear you saying that in Nevada, clean water is [economically] sustainable because of [gambling].

But I'm talking about ecological, biological sustainability, insofar as human life is concerned.

So yeah, I'm dodging your financial model of sustainability altogether, intentionally, because in this case my entire ideological basis is irreconcilable with your model.

water is not a product in my religion, as it is in yours

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

#105

Post by blurbleblurble »

kakarot wrote: post #101
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…

It's more abouy failed leadership than failed engineering. It has to do with how Flint spread responsibility over their water source so thin that no one was to blame and no one had the full picture. Laziness gave way to corruption. I'm sure there were protests from the engineering team.

You do realize that Flint's local government was usurped by an emergency economic manager, right?

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

#106

Post by stouset »

pharrlax wrote: post #44
jacobolus wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The parent comment’s implication is that the administration does not have any plan for dealing with the problem. It was phrased in a sarcastic/jokey way, which doesn’t always read clearly on the internet.

I wonder how you came to that conclusion. (I am not implying you did not come to that conclusion.)

To be fair, his interpretation was my original intent. The "bold assumption" being that this administration has a plan or has any interest in developing a plan to deal with lead in thousands of municipalities' drinking water.

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

#107

Post by rmason »

Spooky23 wrote: post #76
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…

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...

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

#108

Post by AnthonyMouse »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #58
hueving wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which is related to whether or not its sustainable to keep pumping money into Flint.

A city without clean drinking water is unsustainable , regardless of how much money you "pump" into it. You can't drink money.

The problem is that Flint is unsustainable even after you fix the water. That's why nobody will loan them the money.

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

#109

Post by analog31 »

rayiner wrote: post #62
maxerickson wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Framing it that way misses an important part of the story. It was the institutional and regulatory failure during the switch away from Detroit city water that made the lead an emergency. Part of the reason that happened is that Flint had depopulated and was basically a failed city. It's not acceptable that it happened, but it didn't happen just because Flint was trying to skimp on infrastructure 40,50,60 years ago.

It's even bigger than that. Detroit had to raise rates on Flint because a combination of depopulation and terrible management left its water system in dire straits.

Something worth mentioning is that when we talk about "Detroit" we're talking about a system that provides water to nearly half of Michigan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Water_and_Sewerage_Dep...

I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and we got Detroit water. This is no accident -- Lake Huron is some of the cleanest water in the world. Had my town even considered switching from Detroit water, there would have been an uproar.

This is a resource that has no reason other than historical accident, for being a responsibility of the City of Detroit. It looks like it was mainly a way to burden Detroit with more debt.

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

#110

Post by specialist »

Arizhel wrote: post #100
badsock wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...in America. There's lots of developed countries where municipal governments are generally well run as a rule, and while there's always grumbling things never get this out of hand. Lead is posion, for pete's sake. Where else in the developed world would poisoned drinking water be allowed for so long? In Canada we had what we consider a big disaster 17 years ago: http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/inside-walkerton-canada…

Exactly. The question now is: why is American government so broken, and the corollary is: what can we do to fix it? Is American culture simply broken, so that only utterly sociopathic people go into government? Is America just completely filled with people who have been trained from birth to be sociopathic, as evidenced by the way they vote?

Empowering (electing) people who cannot govern, and are in fact utterly opposed to anyone governing, is having the expected outcome.

Because Freedom Markets[tm], booyah!

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