Personally, I don't really understand these water crises in the US. They already had issues in Flint (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis) and now in Jackson? Why is so difficult to get safe drinking water in the US?
Some localities have dedicated funding sources for the water system, and some localities pull the funding from the general fund. As an example, my water bills are paid directly to a water company, which is a public utility company that handles all the water stuff. Other cities might issue the bills, collect the water money, and spend it on "something else."
The main issue IMO is that maintenance can be expensive, and nobody really notices if you defer maintenance for 30 years until the system fails. Until then you can spend that water money on pet projects and retire. At that point it's someone else's problem.
The same issue occurs with road and bridge maintenance, which are usually prime targets for politicians looking for money to fund their projects. Very few cities in the US spend enough money on road/bridge/infrastructure maintenance, because other constituencies want that money.
In many ways that's why water districts that are politically independent are better, but I've never seen any actual surveys on that.
Isn't that a good argument that it should be run by the state government instead?
Local government in the US has so much power, compared to many other countries. It makes you wonder if that's a mistake, and if greater centralisation would produce better outcomes.
However, having services run by larger jurisdictions is directly at odds with the American need to ensure that the "haves" have distinctly better living conditions than the "have nots," and so this is a political non-starter. Put another way: poor services (such as healthcare, schools, and even potable water) are a design feature, not a bug, of American civics.
So there have been multiple generations of Americans who have marinated in this their entire lives, resulting in large populations who assume more local control is always better, people only deserve what they can afford themselves individually, and so on—and entire societal systems built atop the ensuing systematic deprivation.
At the same time, there’s also an almost North Korean degree of jingoistic “we’re the pinnacle of human achievement” nationalism so any change to the status quo is opposed even by those who would directly benefit because they don’t really believe it’s possible for things to be any better. After all, if they could be, they would be, because We’re The Best! So if things are bad, well, they’re worse everywhere else so quit complaining.
This is why Americans get such culture shock going elsewhere in the world. They see that others can actually have a society that’s just as good or better, and they have to figure out how to integrate that into their worldview.
TL;DR: Many things in the US stay as bad as they do because multiple generations have been brainwashed into thinking they’re the best they can be.
You've just illustrated why so many people dislike "the elites". The public are adults. They decide what's in their interests and what isn't, even if it isn't what you think it should be.
In the fifth grade, I was sent home as punishment for not saying the "Pledge of Allegiance" in public school.
It's always been about brainwashing. Always has.
> You've just illustrated why so many people dislike "the elites". The public are adults. They decide what's in their interests and what isn't, even if it isn't what you think it should be.
I've seen what an adult is. "You've been alive for 18 years". That's it. No knowledge checks. No requirement of anything, really.
And your response cements this pervasive idea that "My ignorant opinion is worth just as much as your well studied scientific opinion". That's what our society is facing right now, on every public forum.
Your "well studied scientific opinion" is nothing more than propaganda of a more refined form. Or at least it flatters you to call it "refined."
the most striking experience of this i was able to observe in US boy scouts. there were two boys of similar age who were close friends, until one of them turned 18. he then was made an assistant scout master. some time later the two friends had a falling out because the younger one did not respect his older friend as a leader. it's not that he wasn't qualified as a leader. they probably both were, but that birthday made one be the leader of the other, instead of allowing them to remain peers.
Some of Europe fluoridates tap water. Much of Europe has adequate fluoride levels naturally. Some countries supply fluoride in table salt instead of water. Some have insufficient natural fluoride levels and do nothing. Some have too much fluoride naturally in their water.
We give government special protections that prevent public accountability because it's expected that democracy effectively puts competent people into office. We are continually proving this to be wrong. Our election and powers structure is not accurate to the voter base. Most of these positions go in challenged, because people can't quit their job to fill a government role.
Further, private companies can't keep passing the ball like governments do. They can't pull from other funds, and they have contracted duties. Even better if the company is a co-op.
Tricky to swim in English rivers or beaches at the moment because they're covered in human shit. We have privatised water companies, and there's a good argument that privatisation made it worse.
People on HN think privatisation solves everything, despite the countless examples that show otherwise.
This statement is outright wrong. See this table[0] for details.
[0] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/cp/mapped-immigration-by-co...
Apologies for misinterpreting you.
Sometimes, the state has other skewed motives and will spend the money received from federal governement for unintended causes. This happened in Missouri as well.
Mississippi used welfare money for needy families to pay Brett Favre for motivational speeches
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/mississippi-welfare-...
I get the impression that governments in the US are unusually corrupt, at least by the standards of the English-speaking world.
I think there are reports of bad water fairly often in First Nations communities, but I haven't followed the topic too closely. Some recent information: https://www.cbc.ca/news/indigenous/first-nations-water-drink...
And another one I sort of remember more than 20 years ago was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walkerton_E._coli_outbreak
But these seem to pale in comparison to the limited stories I've heard out of the US. The Flint water crisis, and some of the poorer communities in the US. I do believe water systems are incredibly expensive infrastructure, even for those of us living next to the great lakes.
Looking at major English speaking countries – New Zealand comes 1st as least corrupt country in world (equal with Denmark and Finland); UK is 11th; Canada and Ireland are equal 13th (along with Austria, Estonia and Iceland); Australia is equal 18th (with Belgium, Japan and Uruguay). The US is equal 27th, with Chile. So yes, among major English-speaking countries, the US is the most corrupt.
The short answer is 'Yes'.
The long answer is 'Yes, they do.' It may be more prevalent in the US, because of its particular political climate, but its omnipresent.
Looking at https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021/index/usa I'm worried by how much more corrupt we became after Trump got into power.
You give it to their re-election fund. Because that is free speech.
https://mobile.twitter.com/nntaleb/status/144068888518967706...
In the USA, private sector can provide much better housing, and much better jobs, for most people, so anyone capable of leaving the public ones does. So, public housing eventually becomes dominated by the least functional members of society, and public sector, with the exception of the idealists and the corrupt, mostly retains the incompetents.
The process is self-perpetuating too. Govt aside, in a tech company it's really hard to maintain a semi-crappy department given that people can leave - either it needs to be cleaned up and fixed, or the best developers will leave and it will just become crappy.
I don't remember the details, but at some point Flint changed its water supplier over the protests of the water bureau. Different water -> different chemical composition -> more leaching (wikipedia says it was in 2014).
Many suburban towns rely on growth for a large portion of their revenue. When growth eventually slows they no longer have enough money coming in to the meet their maintenance costs. Strong Towns calls this the “Growth Ponzi Scheme”:
- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon...
- https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
In these areas, what is left is often essentially government welfare. The area runs on social-security checks (which go a long way with cheap cost-of-living, as long as gas prices aren't too high) and government jobs - prisons, military installations, civil positions. And I'm not talking about farm areas etc - that's a local industry too, there are a lot of ex-rural areas where it's almost completely unimproved, the types of places surrounding national forests etc.
What's more, these regions tend to be extremely infrastructure-heavy, there are a lot of miles of road and power-lines per resident, and while sure they don't have sewer, the US's road and power and communications infrastructure are heavily state- and federal-subsidized, state and federal governments chip in a lot on road and power spending. It's effectively a massive transfer of wealth out to regions that are economically unproductive, and while you can argue for or against that as a position, it's pretty unquestionable that money flows out of urban centers and into rural ones, both from government spending and also from service mandates that benefit these uneconomic operating areas (eg in power/telcom).
It's another whole layer on the "growth ponzi scheme" - sometimes the ponzi doesn't just lose its growth, but the market can collapse underneath it too. And it's exceedingly rare that the government entities themselves ever are dissolved as a result - the expectation is that government services are a one-way ratchet.
Just got my two Strong Towns books yesterday, looking forward to diving in!
There was a fire at the water treatment plant in Jackson about a year and a half ago. It took the main water pumps offline, leaving the city with only the smaller emergency backup pumps.
The city refused to repair the damage. The EPA stepped in, but a bit too late.
>Jackson has 45 days to tell the EPA how and when it will repair damage caused by a fire that broke out last April at the O.B. Curtis Water Treatment Plant.
This week, the Environmental Protection Agency issued a notice of noncompliance to the city for failing to repair or replace a damaged electrical panel at the plant.
In addition to telling EPA when and how repairs will be made, the city also must meet with the federal regulatory agency to “show cause why the EPA should not initiate legal proceedings” against the city as a result.
The notice comes about nine months after a fire broke out at the O.B. Curtis plant, shutting down the plant’s high-service pumps.
During a November 8, 2021 inspection of the facility, “the pumps remained out of service, with no target date by the city to put the pumps back into service,” the letter states. “The loss of the pumps has caused multiple elevated tanks to be low or empty and has caused certain areas of the distribution system to have sustained low water pressure.”
https://www.wlbt.com/2022/01/28/epa-cites-jackson-failing-re...
The emergency backup pumps eventually failed too, and the city had no water.
That's the weirdest part. Why?!
Mississippi is a very poor and underdeveloped state.
Cities are blue and so in a red state the government sits back and lets it fail, while the federal government is powerless to intervene until the point of failure. Many other factors layer on top but this is the core of the issue.
Interestingly where I grew up in the U.K. this situation would be impossible because the cities boomed in the Victorian era and so are more compact while the administrative boundary of the city spans a much larger area, including suburbs of the core city itself, so the rise of motorcar suburbanites did not deprive the city of its tax base. We experienced the same trend - the collapse of industry in parallel with the rise of the motorcar leading to wealthy suburbs and a poor urban core. But we had the money to invest in redevelopment.
Many US suburbs choose to incorporate into their own “cities”, in order to avoid being administered by the county, or annexed by a nearby city, so that they may tax commerce (think local strip mall or big box) instead of just property.
Even then, though, cities cannot usually tax outside their boundaries, and county tax rates will be lower (often much, although you're also going to get rural levels of government services in return for your rural-level taxes - the suburbs generally have their own police, schools, fire, etc., rather than relying on the county).
In Flint's case, their local government just did something stupid. That's not a "pattern of poor water quality."
Local governments are given more freedom than in many other countries. Most areas of the US are just fine; I have never lived somewhere with dangerous water.
Everyone everywhere could use more money, but in both cities the fault was at the central pumping station, and was not due to a lack of money.
Jackson wants $1 bil to replace every pipe in their city - that might be nice to do, but it's not what caused the failure.
I imagine the response, in most cases, to a party asking the other to sacrifice a core interest for an infrastructure win is "you can't use 'providing basic services to your constituents' as a bargaining chip, you should want to do that anyway."
... which they can't keep up on. So in 20-40 years, the water supply and roads and other infrastructure decline without any means for replacement.
Sure, perhaps with intelligent setting aside of funds, localities could handle it, but that kind of long term thinking is really hard to expect to happen across all local governments without some sort of federal mandate. Plus, there is always a hidden assumption that you let things get bad and wait for a federal bailout. In some ways, some dramatic crisis like this is exactly as planned.
Finally, we are talking about Mississippi. The South is unquestionably more corrupt at the local and state levels, going back to the reconstruction and post reconstruction eras after the civil war and the intense entrenched racism.
All you really need to do is look at how the South collects more federal aid than blue states, yet Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi routinely rank in the bottom ten for public education by states. Their universities are noteworthy for SEC football and little else.
Things are compounded by the fact that these are frankly really really poor states. It is a bit unfair to cast them as horribly corrupt when Illinois and New York also aren't exactly poster children. BUT, Louisiana/Alabama/Mississippi don't have floods of northerners enriching them like Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina. People do go to New Orleans for tourism, but that's about it, and I'd posit that New Orleans likely still has not recovered from Hurricane Katrina.
Finally, politically these states are owned by vehemently far right anti-government Republicans, and have been for decades. They are all horrendously gerrymandered, so reform is basically impossible. As California shows, when any party has long term control of a government, corruption and incompetence results, and it's only worse when one of the pillars of your party is to hate the government you run. Which gives full license to corruption.
It's extremely misleading to portray the dichotomy as between "the south" and "blue states". Note that red states outside of the south generally score very highly on metrics like income, educational outcomes, quality of life, quality of infrastructure, net tax receipts, etc.
The thing that makes southern states shitty is not the fact that they're red. You can tease out the Simpson's paradox here - go ahead and check average federal aid receipts in southern states after splitting the population by political affiliation. There's a very blue subpopulation in southern states that accounts for a vastly disproportionate fraction of federal spending.
> yet Louisiana, Alabama, and Mississippi routinely rank in the bottom ten for public education by states
Why do you qualify this with "yet"? This is perfectly expected if you understand the causal factors here.
What are the causal factors?
You are generally correct on why and to whom the money goes to in these states, but the fact remains that money goes to these states and not a lot of progress happens. You can say it's the usual intractability of poverty, but at some point you take "Republican State/Local Government" + "Federal Funds" and see they get squandered.
And thus, black water from faucets.
There are lots of federal funds (thanks to congress) that isn't directly dispensed to citizens. Instead it gets granted to the states for their oversight and control, I believe Medicaid works like this, or it did at some point. I leave it as an exercise to the reader as to what happens to state-allocated federal funds in a deeply racist state with gerrymandering specifically designed to maintain white control of government.
It's a State problem to fix with incentives or mandates.
Forget the US constitution entirely, in the abstract why should a country not mandate that if a municipality provide water service, that it be safe to drink? Is that inherently different from setting minimum standards for pollution etc? The water's still unsafe to drink regardless of the cause.
It seems like often there's an "is/ought" thing going on with Americans, people look at the design of the american system and say that X feature is great, without considering the actual impact that feature has had.
The US does mandate this.
https://www.epa.gov/dwreginfo/drinking-water-regulations
And the EPA started taking action in Jackson more than a year ago: https://www.epa.gov/ms/jackson-ms-drinking-water
The problem is that local leaders have the ability to just suck at their job and not make smart long term decisions. And often, this is caused by local opinions about spending priorities and opinions on the role of government.
Most others do fine.
You can have water infrastructure with minimal money if you spend money wisely. If you have plenty of money you can mismanage your money with little consequence. It’s when you have both mismanagement and limited funds that problems arise.
Regional balkanization has a lot of issues; not only are poor areas left with few resources and projects lack coordination and get expensively duplicated, but also they tend to compete with each other to offer tax breaks to companies, and in the end the region gives a big tax break to a company that most likely would’ve located somewhere in the region anyways.
The Corps got it running in a couple days. It was incompetence that caused the problem, and I doubt you will argue that poor people are less smart.
And yes, Flint's water crisis was absolutely connected to a lack of funds. It was directly precipitated by the city's declaration of a financial emergency[1], which in turn caused the city to seek cheaper water sources.
[1]: https://www.mlive.com/news/flint/2011/11/former_acting_mayor...
It's not a "smart or not smart" thing: wealthy areas demand (and receive) adequate attention and funding for their public utilities. Incompetence on the municipal level is a symptom.