We can't take WI's clean drinking water for granted. Pipes and finances weak.

Yahoo

22-03-2025

For more than 30 years, the United Nations has observed March 22 as World Water Day to underscore the importance of fresh water across the globe.
It's an important international day of observance that, frankly, doesn't make much of a splash here in the United States. That's in part because we are blessed with some of the safest drinking water in the world thanks to an advanced regulatory system that, by and large, keeps our water clean, safe, and the envy of much of the world.
Water management is even more impressive in Wisconsin. There are more than 570 water utilities in a state with fewer than 6 million residents. As a point of comparison, the country's largest municipal water utility – New York City's Department of Environmental Protection — serves nearly 9 million residents. Wisconsin utilities track and publish more data than anywhere else in the country. That's partly a legacy of Wisconsin's Progressive Era institutions, and perhaps an artifact of our state's roots in German culture and its famous love of bureaucracy.
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Thanks to Wisconsin's rich water utility data, I am now able to release a first-of-its-kind set of water utility report cards (this site will go live at noon Saturday) that provide clear, accessible information to the public about water quality, infrastructure integrity, operational efficiency and financial strength for 570 water utilities in the state regulated by the Wisconsin Public Service Commission.
This project differs from water utility transparency and reporting efforts in states such as Louisiana and New Jersey insofar as our report cards provide independent performance assessments, unaligned with any regulatory agency or interest group. More importantly, our project focuses on excellence along with accountability: we aim to communicate performance in a way that recognizes strong performance, facilitates accountability, and provides signals of quality to policymakers and the public.
The report cards include grades for multiple subjects—water quality (health), finance, infrastructure and operations, and communications — with each grade based on multiple performance indicators developed and gathered over the last few years.
For the project, my research team and I used extensive data from the PSC, the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources (DNR), and original data collected by the team. It has been a long, arduous project as we developed a novel scoring system, refined it over several iterations, consulted with countless water sector professionals, and refined it yet again.
Milwaukee Water Works is Wisconsin's largest water utility, serving nearly 900,000 people in 16 communities in Milwaukee, Ozaukee and Waukesha Counties.
As an example of the report cards we've created through the Wisconsin Waterworks Excellence project, Milwaukee Water Works scored an excellent 91 (A) in water quality (health) and 94 (A) for communications. This is a remarkable comeback story for a utility that gained national notoriety for a cryptosporidium outbreak 32 years ago.
Milwaukee Water Works continues to face important challenges, including an ongoing effort to replace the city's estimated 65,000 lead service lines, but these strong marks are encouraging. Performance on the other two subjects was more worrisome, as Milwaukee scored just 67 (D) for finance and 64 (D) for infrastructure and operations.
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One of the biggest takeaways from this project is the overall excellence of water quality in Wisconsin. Detected contaminant levels were minimal across the state, resulting in more than 90% of utilities earning an A in this category. It is worth noting that there is no grade inflation at work here.
In fact, scoring an A in this category requires keeping contaminant levels far below what is required by law through the Safe Drinking Water Act. While some Wisconsin communities certainly face serious water quality challenges, statewide performance is impressive and a major validation for Wisconsin's water utilities, which clearly prioritize water quality even beyond regulatory standards. This is something we should all take great pride in as Wisconsinites.
However, good governance and effective public administration can have an ironic downside: our water systems have been so good for so long that we can sometimes take safe tap water for granted. Water is literally essential, but water infrastructure is literally buried. These critical systems only become visible when they break down in high-profile ways.
Such failures can have dire consequences for residents, disproportionately impact marginalized communities, and are symptoms of larger structural vulnerabilities. They also undercut public trust.
While Wisconsin's water quality is excellent overall, the report cards also offer reason for concern.
Financial strength is critical to a utility's sustainability, and affordability is critical to its public health mission. Troublingly, roughly half of our state's utilities scored a C or worse in finance, including Milwaukee Water Works (67). Financial resilience is an ongoing challenge for water utilities in Wisconsin, where many communities' populations are stagnant or shrinking.
Perhaps the most unsettling aspect of our report is the fact that just 6% percent of Wisconsin utilities earned A grades for infrastructure & operations, while 22% — including Milwaukee — received marks in the D-F range. The reasons are complex, but the short answer here is that many of our systems have high rates of water loss and we have far too many main breaks. Midwestern winters are tough on aging infrastructure.
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This is what concerns me as a scholar (and evangelist) of American water governance. Our successes with water quality are laudable, but too many of our state's water utilities struggle with finances and infrastructure; eventually that will affect water quality, too.
In many ways, we are at an inflection point with public drinking water in Wisconsin as our infrastructure ages. Past generations built these magnificent systems, but we can no longer rest on their laurels. Sustaining the everyday miracle of tap water will require care and attention.
My hope is that the Wisconsin Waterworks Excellence Project becomes an important part of our conversations around these critical systems. With these report cards, we aim to make the invisible visible so that Wisconsin's drinking water remains excellent for generations to come.
Manuel P. Teodoro is a professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison and a member of the Water & Health Advisory Council. His Caldwell Prize-winning book, 'The Profits of Distrust: Citizen Consumers, Drinking Water and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government,' explores the relationship between public drinking water and confidence in government.
This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: We take drinking water for granted. Marks are good, for now. | Opinion