Pennsylvania American Water president brings infrastructure funding solutions to House panel

Feb. 10, 2009
In testimony today before the House Consumer Affairs Committee, Pennsylvania American Water President Kathy L. Pape said the state has reached a "turning point" in the challenge of fixing and replacing its aging water and wastewater infrastructure. Pape outlined a list of potential solutions, including proposed legislation to create a surcharge to help fund wastewater system improvements...

• Wastewater system improvement surcharge proposed to avoid "rate shock" for consumers

HARRISBURG, PA, Feb. 4, 2009 -- In testimony today before the House Consumer Affairs Committee, Pennsylvania American Water President Kathy L. Pape said the state has reached a "turning point" in the challenge of fixing and replacing its aging water and wastewater infrastructure. Pape outlined a list of potential solutions, including proposed legislation to create a surcharge to help fund wastewater system improvements.

"Pipe will continue to corrode, erode and break, thus affecting water quality and reliability," said Pape, who also serves as chairperson of the Pennsylvania Chapter of the National Association of Water Companies. "We have arrived not at a crisis, but at a turning point. We can react, or we can proactively adopt strategies to address the operational and financial issues we face."

Appointed by Governor Rendell last year to serve on the Sustainable Water Infrastructure Task Force, Pape said the task force found that the state's water and wastewater systems need $36.5 billion for capital repairs and upgrades over the next 20 years. The task force also reported that Pennsylvania needs $77.1 billion for operations, management and debt service over the next 20 years.

Pape advocated a number of recommendations from the task force that need legislative action to help address the state's infrastructure challenges:
-- Require asset management to ensure that all utilities maintain an inventory of assets, track their assets' conditions, and prepare
long-term plans for rehabilitating or replacing major assets.
-- Move Pennsylvania toward full-cost pricing to ensure that system owners are charging customers the total cost of providing water service.
-- Ensure that fees collected for water/wastewater service are appropriately reinvested.
-- Adopt the Collection System Improvement Charge (CSIC). This proposed surcharge on customers' bills would enable wastewater utilities to recover fixed costs of revenue-neutral system improvement projects between base rate cases.

The CSIC legislation would be modeled after the Distribution System Improvement Charge for water utilities, which the Pennsylvania legislature passed in 1996. "The enactment of CSIC will provide an incentive to speed up the reconstruction of wastewater infrastructure by reducing the lag in recovering the costs of system improvements through small, gradual increases," said Pape. "Thus, you can avoid rate shock for customers."

In 2006, the American Society of Civil Engineers issued a report card for Pennsylvania that rated the water infrastructure D-plus, with the state's wastewater infrastructure earning a D-minus grade. To address aging infrastructure, Pennsylvania American Water has proactively invested in its systems to ensure reliable water and wastewater service for customers, investing approximately $195 million in 2008 and approximately $160 million in 2007.

Pennsylvania American Water, a wholly-owned subsidiary of American Water, is the largest investor-owned water utility in the state, providing high-quality and reliable water and/or wastewater services to more than 2 million people.

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