Contract on Water

Why has public participation in Holyoke's dealings with Aquarion Water Services been kept to a minimum?

http://valleyadvocate.com/gbase/News/content?oid=oid:90372

by Maureen Turner - November 18, 2004

BOB ROBINSON PHOTO

Feature

Holyoke Mayor Mike Sullivan says privatization could lead to better wastewater management for the city.

After years of planning, the city of Holyoke is poised to privatize its wastewater treatment system, a move supporters say would save money. But some residents say the plan has been pushed through with minimal public input and lots of unanswered questions.

Under the plan, the city would pay Aquarion Water Services of Bridgeport, Conn., $8.5 million a year for 20 years to run its wastewater treatment system. Consultants hired by the city say the deal would save ratepayers as much as $8.5 million a year. It would also allow upgrades to the wastewater overflow facility on Berkshire Street, which regularly discharges sewage into the Connecticut River during heavy rains.

In 2001, the Environmental Protection Agency ordered the city to fix that problem by September 2004. The city failed to meet the deadline, and earlier this month, the EPA threatened to impose fines. "EPA is getting antsy," said Mayor Mike Sullivan, who has final say on the contract. "At the end of the day, all I'm looking for is the simplest, most economical, most efficient way to abate the risk."

But resident Carolyn Toll Oppenheim calls the EPA threat a "red herring" designed to push through privatization. Oppenheim is a member of the Western Massachusetts Committee on Corporations and Democracy, which describes itself as "a grassroots organization working to strip corporations of powers, including corporate personhood, that have been usurped from we the people, in the law."

"We live in a society right now [that] favors privatization," Oppenheim told the Advocate. "The prevailing thinking is: Of course a private company can do this better than the public."

In its rush to privatize, Oppenheim said, the city has left residents out of the loop; for example, the deadline for public comment on the Aquarion deal was Nov. 1, even though a final contract has yet to be made available. "These corporations come into our region and citizens don't have a lot of support to get information and look at it in a transparent way," she said.

City Councilor Elaine Pluta says the council also has been left out of the process. And she's suspicious, too, of the pressure from the EPA. "They know we're working on [fixing the overflow problem]; they know we're going to move forward," she said. "Why are they suddenly pushing it forward? I'm suspect of where that pressure is really coming from."

Pluta opposes the privatization plan. "It's the one department in the city that's in the black, that makes money every year," she said. "Why are we giving that away?" The city, she said, is perfectly capable of running the system and making the needed improvements.

Holyoke isn't the first community to consider privatizing water services. According to the advocacy group Public Citizen, 15 percent of tap water in the U.S. is delivered by private companies, and corporations are aggressively pursuing more municipal contracts. That trend worries people who don't want to see a vital natural resource controlled by corporate interests -- particularly in light of a World Bank prediction that, by 2025, two-thirds of the world's population will face shortages of fresh drinking water.

"Water's unique and public nature is not amenable to free-market solutions. Regulation is necessary to protect public health and affordability, but corporate executives and stockholders chafe under any restrictions that could remotely limit their profits, even for the public good," Public Citizen says.

In September, after a contentious debate, the town of Lee rejected a proposal to privatize its water system. On Monday, an anti-privatization organizer from Lee spoke at a public meeting in Holyoke organized by Holyoke Citizens for Open Government.

Sullivan noted that Aquarion would only take over wastewater treatment; the city would continue to handle water supply. The city would retain the power to set water and sewer rates and would still own all the treatment facility property.

Privatization of public services makes sense in some situations, Sullivan argued: "There are people who are going to say, 'If they're making a profit, we're paying too much.' But I think that's a kind of myopic look." A company like Aquarion (the largest private water utility in New England, with contracts in 53 communities) brings to the complex job valuable experience that a municipality cannot, he said.

Sullivan pointed out that the City Council voted to spend $1.2 million to hire consultants to look into privatization and evaluate bids. A civic review committee with experts in law, the environment and accounting is also reviewing the contract. Sullivan said he's open to hearing citizens' concerns. "But if it's just 'profits are bad' and 'we don't like corporations,'" he said, "that's not going to carry as much water."