Water Industry Shifts 'Affordability' Program Study Focus To Legal Barriers

摘要

Water utilities are shifting their focus from surveying municipal programs that address concerns about low-income households' ability to pay for water and wastewater services to studying the legal barriers to creating such programs, and will collaborate with EPA's recently announced efforts to survey existing programs to help inform potential federal efforts to create a new subsidy program. "We were going to do what EPA was doing," a water industry source says. "Now we are going to look into the legal battles, and benchmark what is going on in the gas and electric area with their low income funds and learn from those." Groups that had been discussing surveying existing programs include the Water Environment Federation (WEF), the National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), the National Association of Water Companies (NAWC) and the American Water Works Association (AWWA).