When the Clean Water Act was passed in the 1970’s one of the features was the creation of a revolving fund that would finance infrastructure improvement to upgrade or build new water and wastewater facilities. But over the decades it died the death of a thousand cuts by Congress and the Executive Branch. A personal example is my efforts to get a small Oregon city to upgrade its water and wastewater systems when I served on its city council. Its sole claim to fame was a large papermill that made cardboard and paper bags. Located on one of the larger rivers in Oregon, the papermill had a self contained water and wastewater plant system. It operated one of the largest biodigester style wastewater plant that used a lagoon system to purify the wastes from the plant before discharging into the river which had one of the largest coho salmon runs in Oregon. When NAFTA passed, the conglomerate multinational paper corporation moved all of its pulp mills to Mexico. The sister pulp mill in Arkansas also lost its pulp mill. I approached the local caretaker manager and asked him what was to come of the water rights and waste water plant. He indicated that the company was amenable to negotiations to turn them over to the city I represented. When I went to investigate getting funds from the Clean Water Act revolving fund, I found out there were no revolving fund monies.
Similarly, the county were I now live in Hawaii is under Federal court order to replace the community cesspools that the sugar companies left to serve their former plantation towns. Community cesspools are large perforated concrete tanks that leech wastewater directly into the ground with no treatment. Naturally any downstream water well would be contaminated with byproducts of human waste. Through a series of delaying tactics the county has put off building any modern wastewater plants for decades. The last iteration would build the plants at a construction cost of $400,000 per hookup to the new system and a possible $10–20,000 new hookup fee. Clearly a disincentive to build a modern wastewater plant for the county or build a new home. Thirty years of inaction and inflation has lead to a price tag that is exorbitant.
I imagine similar situations are playing out all across America. Cities and counties do not have the money to upgrade or install modern water and wastewater systems. Flint, Michigan being an example of trying to save money by switching its water source to the polluted Flint River from a clean source in using Detroit city water. We all saw what happened.
President Biden has said that he wants to rebuild America’s infrastructure. So did that guy who preceded him. The wheel doesn’t need to be reinvented. It exists. It only needs to be funded.