Fix The Sewer, Grow The Economy

As Congress and state legislatures across the nation debate economic stimulus, investments in green infrastructure -- wind and solar power and expansion of mass transit, for example -- are getting well-deserved attention.  The environment is, after all, the foundation of our nation's infrastructure.  Investments in green infrastructure that provide jobs, power the economy, and protect the planet reflect that reality and offer taxpayers a multifaceted return on investment.  As green infrastructure gains prominence as a component of job creation, however, it is vital that green investment include "blue" infrastructure: our water supply and wastewater treatment systems.

My colleague Michelle Mehta and I have been looking at how investments in water resources infrastructure can stimulate the economy and address increasingly serious environmental problems associated with water supply and treatment systems that sometimes literally are falling apart. 

The environmental issues are hard to overstate.  For example, the American Society of Civil Engineers gives the nation's drinking water and wastewater infrastructures a "D-" and estimates that six billion gallons of clean drinking water are squandered each day due to old, leaky pipes and mains. 

So it's not surprising that the EPA estimates that the total national need for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure investment over the next 20 years approaches $500 billion.  But replacing pipes is only part of the answer. 

To reduce a growing water pollution source, urban runoff, we need to invest in greening urban environments to prevent rain from sweeping torrents of urban pollution into the water.  Yet federal assistance is not even coming close to meeting this demand.  In 2006, federal spending on water supply and wastewater treatment was $4 billion -- only about five percent of all infrastructure spending.  Adjusted for inflation, federal contributions to the Clean Water State Revolving Funds, which provide low interest loans to state and local governments to fund water quality protection projects, declined by 70 percent since 1991.

According to the EPA, our aging wastewater treatment systems cause the discharge of 860 billion gallons of untreated or partially treated sewage into waterways each year.  For example, recently Orange County, Calif., experienced its worst sewage spill in nearly a decade, when an aging sewer system spilled more than 500,000 gallons of sewage onto streets and into the ocean.  In San Diego and Honolulu (cities nearly synonymous with beaches and surfing) and in dozens of other communities wastewater treatment plants still discharge minimally-treated sewage into the ocean.  EPA estimates that without significant investment in sewage treatment systems, by 2025 key indicators of water pollution could reach levels not seen since before passage of the Clean Water Act -- undoing decades of progress. 

Funding "blue" infrastructure projects, though, is a win-win situation for the environment and the economy.  It is estimated that for each billion that the federal government invests in infrastructure, between 35,000 and 47,000 jobs are supported.  Communities throughout the nation have more than $4 billion of wastewater treatment projects ready to go to construction within 90 days, if funding is made available.  Just one such project in the 1990s, the upgrade of Los Angeles' Hyperion Sewage Treatment Plant, created more than a thousand jobs and is credited with major improvements in coastal water quality.  Funding is often cited as a major obstacle to upgrading similar treatment plants, such as in San Diego and Honolulu. 

These infrastructure upgrades are vital for the environment, now more than ever.  With water shortages across the country, high energy demand to treat and move water, and population growth, we cannot afford aging drinking water systems that leak as much as 20 percent of their volume annually.  Likewise, we cannot rationally throw away billions of gallons of urban runoff when it can be cleaned up and put back in groundwater aquifers.  And we cannot ignore the potential of wastewater treatment plants to use advanced technology to purify wastewater so that it can be used again. 

A federal infusion of money for clean water infrastructure projects of all stripes would provide jobs and a cleaner environment, all for the same buck.   Lawmakers at the state and federal level should fund "blue" building projects to ensure that the water we drink and swim in is safe for years to come-and that there is enough of it to go around.