by James A. Bacon
In a myriad of small ways, the City of Richmond’s water woes have spilled into neighboring Henrico County where I live. The County is on water-boil alert, making cooking meals a hassle. One of my favorite restaurants, which is normally half full on Wednesday nights, was so jammed with diners when I stopped by to pick up a pizza that nary a spare table was seen. With no water service in their city apartments, my son and his girlfriend dropped by last evening for hot showers. (It’s always good to see them, so I’m not complaining.)
Needless to say, in the city itself, where service last night had been restored to a mere trickle, the water shutdown is not a minor inconvenience, it’s an all-consuming preoccupation. As city officials inch closer to getting taps and toilets flowing, people are looking beyond the immediate crisis and asking how to make sure a shutdown never happens again.
One line of thought, advanced by the Richmond Times-Dispatch editorial board yesterday and by RTD columnist Michael Paul Williams today, is to seek a regional solution.
“Nothing works without water. Simply put, this cannot happen again,” writes Williams. “Once we move from crisis mode to assessment mode, there needs to be honest dialogue on what went wrong, how to prevent it, and whether our current water setup makes sense if it doesn’t protect the entire region from an unforeseen catastrophe. Rather than our patchwork network, how about a truly regional framework for water delivery?”
Let’s unpack this. It is true, the failure of the City of Richmond’s water system had regional consequences because Henrico and Hanover Counties depend in part on Richmond for their water supplies. But as a Henrico resident, I have a very different reaction than Williams.
Far from regarding regional integration as a good idea, I’m thinking that Henrico should do everything possible to insulate itself from Richmond’s dysfunctional government. Any hard-and-fast conclusion is tentative until we know more, but that’s my instinct at this moment.
As I detailed in my post yesterday, Richmond’s water foes may have been triggered by a 2- to 4-inch snowfall, but the meltdown of the water treatment system was hardly an act of god. Brief interruptions of electric power are inevitable and must be planned for. Critical systems like water plants must be designed with redundant systems to maintain service under all but the most extreme events.
Will an in-depth inquiry find out that the city has been chronically underfunding maintenance, repairs and upgrades for years, as I suggested yesterday? If so, no one would be surprised. City accounting is a shambles. Unpaid utility bills doubled between fiscal 2017 and fiscal 2022. Credit-card controls are abysmal. The City can’t complete its Comprehensive Annual Financial Reviews on time. For years under former Mayor Levar Stoney, City Hall was far more preoccupied with “equity” than sound, effective government.
Meanwhile, CBS Channel 6 News has dug up a 2022 Environmental Protection Agency audit that confirms my maintenance-underfunding theory. The EPA report cited the utility department with “dozens of violations of federal regulatory standards including multiple corroded and deteriorated pumps at the main treatment plant, filters that were aged and cracked, inspections not regularly being performed, and limited preventive and corrective maintenance.”
I have plenty of disagreements with Henrico County’s spending priorities, but at least the apparatus of county government is well run.
If Henrico joined Richmond in a regional governance structure for water and wastewater, whose municipal culture would prevail, Henrico’s or Richmond’s? If Richmond ceded total authority to Henrico, I might be fine with a regional approach. But if Richmond’s municipal culture prevailed, I’d be stocking my garage with pallets of bottled water.
I’m hoping that Richmond’s new mayor, Danny Avula, will bring about what Stoney promised but never accomplished: reforming City Hall. But I’m not willing to bet the security of my water supplies on a prayer.
If it can be documented that Richmond has been chronically underfunding its water- and waste-treatment facilities and racking up millions of dollars in deferred maintenance, there is an even more compelling reason for Henrico citizens to be skeptical of a regional water system. A merger of the two systems could saddle Henrico with a share of the potentially multimillion-dollar burden of working off Richmond’s accumulated liabilities.
In what world should Henrico citizens get stuck financially for the manifest failures of the city’s political class and the willingness of city voters to tolerate them?
Those are my concerns. I’m willing to withhold final judgment until we get more definitive assessments of what went wrong and why. Unless a thorough study reaches unexpected conclusions, though, I’m not inclined to endorse a regional solution to Richmond’s water-wastewater problems.
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