In response to the Baltimore Water Regional Governance Task Force draft report that recommends a regional authority, 21 community, labor, environmental and social justice organizations are demanding that the Task Force reject that approach, calling for city and state elected officials to protect local control of the city’s largest asset – the $5.5 billion water and sewer system. 

The public comment period on the draft report extends until only January 5, 2024, affording the public very little time to review and provide feedback over the Holiday season. 

According to the draft report, control of the water and sewer system would transfer to a new authority board whose members would be appointed by Baltimore City, Baltimore County and the Governor. 

At the last task force meeting, task force members expressed concern with this approach because of major unsolved challenges associated with an authority, including refinancing existing debt at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars, transferring the workforce and worker pensions, and overturning Baltimore City’s charter provision that bans water privatization. 

“At a time when our city is working hard for local control of our schools and police, it is alarming and outrageous that we face the prospect of losing local control of our essential water services,” said Mary Grant, the Public Water for All Campaign Director at Food & Water Watch. “The draft recommendation punts every single substantial issue — from worker pensions to water affordability to debt refinancing – to a transition period to a regional authority, but that information is critical to determine the viability of an authority in the first place. The task force must reject this preposterous and baseless recommendation, and instead move forward with improving the intermunicipal agreements to ensure safe, affordable, publicly controlled water for all.“ 

As laid out in the letter to the Task Force, advocates estimate that creating a regional water authority could result in an estimated $1.7 to 2.5 billion in transaction costs. This estimate includes the cost to refinance existing debt, cover lease payments, and ensure pension benefits under a new authority. 

The Task Force has not conducted a racial and economic equity assessment of a regional water authority, arguing that it is another issue to be addressed during the transition to an authority. Water affordability too was identified as an unresolved threshold issue to be addressed during the transition period. 

“The Task Force should conduct a racial equity impact assessment and an economic equity impact assessment on a regional authority model before recommending the model for future legislation,” said David Wheaton, economic justice policy fellow for the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (LDF). “Efforts to regionalize water systems in other jurisdictions such as Detroit have hurt Black communities. Baltimore is already working to address a water affordability crisis which has had a disproportionate and detrimental impact on the City’s Black neighborhoods. Hastily rushing to establish a new governance model without doing critical analyses on how a new model will affect Black residents and low-income ratepayers risks undermining this progress and creating even greater disparities.”

The recommendation for a regional authority is predicated on baseless assumptions and vague arguments about greater economies of scale under that model, but the consultants have provided no data or evidence to substantiate any of their claims. In fact, experience from other cities that have undergone such a transition directly counter their assumptions. 

For example, the consultants claim without evidence that a regional authority will improve worker retention, but information from Detroit shows that the water system lost nearly 15 percent of its workforce through the transition to the Great Lakes Water Authority. The consultants also claim that an authority would lead to great water affordability, despite the potential multibillion-dollar cost of establishing the authority and despite academic studies finding authorities charge higher rates than municipal water departments. 

As case studies from Detroit and Tampa Bay show, a regional authority could lead to mass water shutoffs, water privatization and the loss of potentially thousands of unionized positions within city and county government.