E-Mail This Article to a Friend The coming water wars As multinational corporations seek control of New England’s public water supply, the next environmental battleground could be your kitchen sink BY DEIRDRE FULTON

GET READY FOR the next big environmental battles — let’s call them water wars — as multinational corporations seek control of New England’s public water supply, bottled-water sales soar, water pollution worsens, and cities and towns struggle to pay for much-needed improvements to water pipes and sewage systems. Looking around at April’s shower-soggy ground, it might be hard to believe that one of our most basic human needs is becoming a scarce commodity, something to be bought and sold on the open market. Sure, there are water shortages in the American West. And it’s terrible that corrupt governments are allowing private corporations to profit from water crises in, say, South America. But these things couldn’t happen here, right?

Well, maybe not in the same way, but that doesn’t mean we’re home free. In progressive communities, water pollution and water conservation have been on the radar at least since the late 1960s. Now, activists say, new water-related concerns — namely, water privatization, the effects of the bottled-water industry, and a pending decline in water levels and purity — are starting to emerge, which require new strategies.

Tackling water issues presents a terrific opportunity for grassroots activism, organizers say, because each town or city has its own local concerns — political, geographic, and historical.

Take, for example, Lee — a town of about 6000 in Western Massachusetts. Last year, Concerned Citizens of Lee united to beat back an attempt by the North American arm of French multinational company Veolia Water to take over the municipal wastewater and water-treatment facilities.

Or how about the couple dozen environmental activists who gathered at Worcester’s Clark University on a Saturday in March, for the first of what organizers hope will be an annual water conference? They came from Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Washington, DC, and there wasn’t a water bottle in sight. On view instead was a growing network of water warriors.

David and Goliath

"Some things should never be commodified," says Jonathan Leavitt, the organizing director for Massachusetts Global Action, which battles corporate globalization and coordinated the water conference at Clark. "High on that list are things that essentially we need to live." With water, he explains, "you don’t have an option — it’s not a luxury."

Yet water commodification seems to be well under way — in places as far away as India and as close by as Holyoke and Lynn. In 2001, the latest year for which privatization statistics are available, water and wastewater privatization shot up 13 percent nationwide, after a huge 84 percent jump through the 1990s. Of the 80,000 local government entities in the country, 1300 have privatized wastewater and 1100 have privatized water services. And "it’s been trending up," says privatization expert Geoffrey Segal, of the Reason Public Policy Institute, a Los Angeles nonpartisan think tank that promotes economic choice and competition.

Improvements to (or construction of) water- and sewage-treatment systems can be prohibitively expensive — all the more so in the face of declining federal and state financial assistance over the past five years.

It’s under these strained circumstances that huge, international corporations (primarily with European roots) come into the picture. They offer to lift the burden of providing water or wastewater services from the shoulders of municipal governments, in return for long-term, multi-million-dollar contracts — and the wherewithal to charge water consumers higher prices than they currently pay.

Put aside for a moment the question of whether any of us feels comfortable entrusting our local town aldermen or city councilors with crafting a big-money international trade contract. Here’s what activists say is the real problem: would we rather leave control of our water services in the hands of elected officials, or in the pockets of business executives who’ve already moved on to the next town to drum up more contracts?

It’s not necessarily that privatization is bad (though many activists think it is), says civil- and environmental-engineering professor Paul Kirshen, who teaches in Tufts University’s water-management program. "It’s just one of the many management techniques that has to be properly applied and supervised to respond to our global water crisis," he says. "But so far, there are very few cases where that’s been successful."

Municipal officials in Holyoke hope their experiment in water management might be one of the exceptions. Aquarion Water Company, a Bridgeport, Connecticut–based British subsidiary, came knocking in the city of about 40,000 last year. In November, Aquarion came close to closing a 20-year contract with the city — one that Holyoke mayor Michael Sullivan, some members of the city council, and the Department of Public Works support. The 700-page deal, which activists have succeeded in holding up, would give Aquarion $24 million to design, build, and operate Holyoke’s sewage-treatment system, and to remove and revamp the town’s combined-sewer-overflow (CSO) system.

CSOs are engineered to allow rainwater to drain into sewage tunnels; if those tunnels get too full, they overflow into rivers and oceans. Recognizing the negative environmental impact of such a system, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has issued CSO-removal mandates, and is threatening steep fines if Holyoke doesn’t remove its CSOs by July 1. Obviously, the city is under considerable pressure to approve some version of an infrastructure-improvement project.

(Wastewater treatment might not be as sexy as drinking-water treatment, but it’s an integral part of any municipal water system. And, "operating or owning sewage-treatment plants means that a private corporation has a foot in the door," points out Ruth Caplan, of the Water Allies Network and the progressive organization Alliance for Democracy, "making it easier to position themselves to operate the whole system.")

Community activists, incensed that they were being left out of the process, aggressively sought a chance to provide input. Led by the newly created Holyoke Citizens for Open Government (HCOG), they were successful in stretching out the public-comment period and getting the proposed contract posted on the city’s Web site. HCOG gathered almost 500 residents at a public meeting in Holyoke High School to discuss the negotiations; last weekend, the group sent out a direct mailing about the proposed contract to all city water consumers.

"Small municipalities are being eaten for lunch by large multinational corporations," says Carolyn Toll Oppenheim, a Holyoke resident who is among HCOG’s core leaders. "So the buck has to stop in those little places."

For Oppenheim, this privatization battle is about everything from democratic principles to economics (it’s almost certain that rates will rise if the contract is approved). She doesn’t have to look further than across the state, to Lynn, for an example of a private contract gone terribly wrong.

In 2000, the city of Lynn was under similar pressure to remove its CSOs (a process called sewer separation). The city entered into a $48 million contract with German subsidiary USFilter — after a bidding process that, along with the contract itself, was severely criticized by the Massachusetts Office of the Inspector General just months later. The project went awry when both parties disagreed about the terms of the contract. Lynn flat-out fired USFilter in March 2004.

"I felt that there were some really misleading representations made about all the cost savings that they were realizing by privatizing it," recalls Janet Werkman, who was first assistant inspector general when the 2001 report was written. "In fact, I didn’t see any savings at all."

Worried that her city might repeat Lynn’s mistake, Holyoke city councilor Elaine Pluta has been an outspoken opponent of the Aquarion contract. She’s also been sharply critical of the bidding process. "They didn’t use the right numbers," she says of consultants hired to analyze Aquarion’s bid.

This time around, the state inspector general is stepping in early. Last week, IG Gregory Sullivan sounded a warning in a letter to Holyoke’s mayor: "It is not our role to assert ourselves into a local public policy debate," the letter read. "[H]owever, as the city contemplates this long-term commitment it would be prudent to ensure that all information relevant to the privatization decision is accurate and complete."

Could all this happen in Boston? Not likely, experts say. The city and surrounding municipalities get their water, their wastewater services, or both from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) — a giant system that pulls 230 million gallons of water a day from reservoirs in Central Massachusetts. But Ria Convery, MWRA communications director, acknowledges that several years ago, "they came knocking on the door here."

Evidently, when they got no response, they moved on to smaller conquests.