Federal and state funding agencies have provided funding for more than 40 years, supporting our efforts to collect, deliver, and treat water – often at lower interest rates than other sources. They also provide oversight, seeing that public funds are allocated and distributed fairly. But this has come with costs – costs we can no longer afford in a time of decreasing infrastructure funding.
There’s another way that will allow us to deliver projects more efficiently and reduce costs: privately funding water infrastructure projects. Our future should include private activity bonds, public-private partnerships, even an infrastructure bank, along with other methods that could help finance infrastructure while reducing costs for utilities, rate payers, and all of us as tax payers.