The House Consumer Affairs Committee this week held an informational meeting on issues facing drinking water and wastewater systems and heard from a variety of industry and government representatives.

Karl Kyriss, Regional President of Aqua Pennsylvania, said the most pressing issue facing the water and wastewater industry is its infrastructure, citing a 2006 American Society of Civil Engineers repord card for Pennsylvania which gave drinking water systems a D+ and wastewater systems a D-.

Kyriss said most of present infrastructure was built following World War II and many municipalities have infrastructure approaching 100 years old.

He noted many municipal systems do not have the resources or sometimes the political will to raise rates to a level needed to become viable and take care of necessary improvements to their infrastructure.

Kyriss said in cases like this, invester-owned companies like Aqua Pennsylvania offer a reasonable alternative since they can take advantage of their economies of scale and system-wide resources to deal with issues. He also pointed out, that every dollar a customer pays toward their bill pays to recoup the investment made by the company in that infrastructure.

As an example, Kyriss pointed to Briston Water Treatment Plan in Bucks County that faced a $1 million debt to bring the plant up to federal and state standards in 1996. Bristol sold the plant to Aqua for $25 million and in the follow 10 years Aqua invested nearly $25 million to rebuild the facility.

Kyriss recommended municipally-owned and investor-owned systems have an equal chance to get state funding through PennVEST and other sources and that barriers to investor-owned companies buying struggling systems be eliminated.

A copy of Kyriss’ testimony is available online.

Also presenting comments were Dan Warnock, President Pennsylvania American Water, John Hollenbach, Vice President and Manager United Water Pennsylvania for the Pennsylvania Chapter National Association of Water Companies, and Sonny Popowsky, Consumer Advocate of Pennsylvania.

4/13/2007