Guess Who WIFIA Is Really Going to Help? (Hint: It’s Not Flint, Mich.)

The water crisis in Flint has sparked new interest in renewing our nation’s water infrastructure. While it’s upsetting that it’s taken a tragedy to convince lawmakers of the need to fix neglected, aging community water systems, we welcome this long overdue conversation. Unfortunately, some of the so-called “solutions” being floated are anything but. The Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (better known as WIFIA) for instance, is actually a give-away to for-profit water entities, and will do nothing to help Flint or other communities in need. Here are five reasons why:

1. WIFIA does not prioritize public health, water quality compliance or affordability. We already have a mechanism in place to fund community water systems. They’re called the State Revolving Funds (SRFs), and they prioritize communities whose water systems need the most help in order to address serious risks to human health and to make sure those systems are meeting water quality standards. The problem is that federal funding to the SRFs has dwindled over the years. Since 1977, federal funding for water infrastructure has been cut by 74 percent in real dollars. But WIFIA is more about allocating federal funding to commercial development and private corporations. WIFIA has 11 criteria for prioritizing funding, not one of which addresses human health, water quality compliance or affordability. Instead, WIFIA prioritizes funding to large-scale projects, to privatized projects and to projects serving areas with oil and gas development.

2. Flint and other disadvantaged communities are ineligible for WIFIA loans. While the Flint water crisis has renewed the public conversation about WIFIA, let’s not pretend that WIFIA will actually help solve Flint’s water problems, or that of other low-income communities’. Flint is not even eligible for funding under WIFIA because it only subsidizes low-interest loans for projects that have an investment-grade bond rating. In other words, in order to receive funding under WIFIA, a project has to have been declared worthy of investment by one of the bond rating agencies. Flint, however, has “no current [bond] ratings,” according to the city’s 2015 Comprehensive Annual Financial Report. Flint’s previous bond ratings were removed as its fiscal situation became more dire. Despite this, Flint has the highest water rates in the country among large systems, indicating a clear need for federal support. WIFIA is designed to allow federal subsidies to be used by communities in less need of assistance than those communities prioritized by the SRFs.

3. WIFIA competes with the SRFs. Under WIFIA, the EPA provides assistance directly to applicants instead of allocating funding through the SRFs. By bypassing the SRFs while funding the same activities, WIFIA creates unnecessary redundancies and competes with the proven SRF programs for federal dollars and attention. Disadvantaged and rural communities will get a raw deal since they may not be eligible for WIFIA funding. The SRFs have already proven effective as a means of allocating funds to water projects. Why reinvent the wheel, but in a shoddier manner?

4. WIFIA facilitates the takeover of community water systems by for-profit entities. Under WIFIA, projects that involve expensive private financing are among those that get first dibs at funds. As a result, local governments are pressured to privatize water system projects in order to get funds. As one member of EPA’s Environmental Financial Advisory Board put it: “WIFIA could be a key component in energizing P3s [public-private partnerships] in the water sector.” A 2015 EPA presentation on WIFIA suggests that WIFIA funding would be “very attractive for privately-owned projects” as well as for public-private partnerships.

5. Communities need help—now. Instead of programs that mainly help corporations, we should be talking about increasing funding to the SRFs to get money out to the communities most in need of assistance—as quickly as possible. We support calls for an increase in fiscal year 2017 appropriation to the SRFs. This fix would be much more useful to communities across the country than funding WIFIA, but in the long term, it is itself insufficient to solve our nation’s water infrastructure crisis.

The Flint water crisis has exposed the cracks in our nation’s water systems, and it has undermined public faith in an essential resource that nobody should ever fear. We need to restore our nation’s confidence in public water and to do that communities need a reservoir of funds to draw from, not a mere trickle.

Restoring Confidence in Our Water

We need a dedicated, sustainable, long-term source of funding for our water systems. Right now, water systems fall billions of dollars short of the funding they need to ensure safe, clean, affordable water for the communities they serve. To solve this problem, we need a national fund for our nation’s water systems with a permanent, dedicated source to close the multibillion-dollar gap. The fund should direct that money to the SRFs, prioritizing communities most in need. It should include new grant programs to help replace homeowners’ water service lines that contain lead; help public schools test and replace their drinking water infrastructure; and assist tribal governments in building safe water systems for their communities.

The Flint water crisis has exposed the cracks in our nation’s water systems, and it has undermined public faith in an essential resource that nobody should ever fear. We need to restore our nation’s confidence in public water and to do that communities need a reservoir of funds to draw from, not a mere trickle.