First big tranche of infrastructure dollars heading to states for water, lead pipes

I don’t know what percentage of public utilities are municipality owned, even if the utilities are municipality owned, it doesn’t make any difference. I’ll give you an example from the area I live with truly municipality owned utilities, sanitary sewer authorities. In Lackawanna County, Pa. the two largest sanitary sewer authorities are the LRBSA (Lackawanna River basin Sewer Authority and the SSA (Scranton Sewer Authority).

The LRBSA is efficient and well run. We enjoy good service and get good value for our rates/fees.

The SSA is very political and to put it mildly, they can’t find their rear ends with both their hands. Their rates are sky high, service is poor, they are poorly run, their equipment is always down that creates urgent situations very often. Scranton is so bad that they gave up on running the SSA and sold the SSA to Pa. American Water Company (PAWC). While PAWC is a public utility they pay dividend to their stockholders.

Now do you think it’s fair that tax money be taken from the rest of the Lackawanna River Basin to help the SSA pay for their incompetence, some would say corruption? Well it’s the same thing happening nationally now, only it’s worse. It appears they are taking this money from a general fund thus hiding it from accountably. It is typically the way of the left to believe they can buy their way out of any difficulty they are in. They don’t care about the price; they attempt to justify their incompetence by saying “We just need more funding to solve this problem”.

You are right about Flint. They had unqualified people making decisions that had consequences that they did not foresee, but qualified people would have foreseen the consequences, that’s what professionals do. What happened in Flint is the textbook definition of incompetence.

Sorry to take so long, it’s not easy to explain a complex situation in a few paragraphs. While I said I had mixed emotions about this originally, after thinking about it: it's a bad idea. All this is going to do is make the federal administration larger and increase inflation. When there is more work than contractors out there, the price of work goes up astronomically. I saw this happen when working for PennDOT in the 1990's, we put out way too many projects and the costs rang our bell. One can't snap their fingers and create competence contractors overnight, or even years... I can go on but I won't bore you.

Everyone needs assistant, and free money is always welcome. I can’t get out of my mine ownership and maintenance responsibilities. Even if the water company is municipality owned, they have a responsibility to own and maintain their property from their fees for service. If they can’t maintain their infrastructure, they need to increase their fees. People from Pa. shouldn’t be paying for improvements from infrastructure in Ca. where they may, or may not, have been responsible. Remember you always get what you vote for. If you vote for a clown who doesn’t know what they’re doing, then you pay more in maintenance and replacement costs. It’s not right to take money from responsible run municipalities.

I have a well and am totally responsible for all mait. no help from the gov for me

Sgt Jim Belanus - I believe this is just them making the federal government larger with all funding/money for anything going through the Federal Administration. They take in tax money from everyone, and then decide where to spend it. We have nothing to say about it.

I've seen this done. most small cities use grant money to fix water , waste water and streets. trying to spare their local residence but it always comes with hitches and mostly it's a shared cost with locals paying 40 to 50% of the costs

I was a Utility Relocation Administrator for a few years in my life. I have seen utilities run efficiently and wise, and I have seen utilities run poor; sometimes putting off maintenance that will actually increase costs in the future. These are the utilities/municipalities I am speaking about. A utility/municipality needs to have their rates/fees at a level where they are sustainable.