Water privatization is coming under renewed scrutiny from Pa. lawmakers and regulators

The biggest for-profit water utility in Pennsylvania announced in November that it planned to collect an additional $204 million from customers — less than a year after the company’s last rate hike.

It may have been a major strategic error.

Over the next couple months, public hearings held by the state’s utility regulator were packed with frustrated ratepayers whose complaints were echoed by politicians — notwithstanding Pennsylvania American Water’s assurances that the revenue would help fund $1 billion in upgrades to water and sewer plants and other infrastructure. An investment analyst who follows utilities later wrote that he’d been attending such rate case hearings for years and had “never seen anything like those we attended in recent days.”

For-profit utilities in Pennsylvania have scooped up more than 20 water and sewer systems from municipal governments during the last eight years, spurred by a state law that changed how such assets are valued. Municipalities have used sale proceeds to pay off debt, invest in capital projects, and avoid tax increases.

[link:https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/water-privatization-is-coming-under-renewed-scrutiny-from-pa-lawmakers-and-regulators-as-consumers-sour-on-rate-increases/ar-BB1lcZzL?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=41ac8df1e17b4f0e9d89122c6629b83b&ei=30|

Long article and a lot going on. While most will lament the purchase of public utilities by private companies, there's a lot of very old infrastructure out there that is due for replacing. Private companies were supposed to help in this endeavor since they would have the capital and experience that may have been lacking in the public sector. Not working out, probably because most public systems were shored up with other unrelated tax revenue streams. Thus the operation was not reflecting the true costs.