Shutting off water service to a family's home is an extraordinary step, impacting as it does not just comfort or convenience but the very ability to live. Some advocates argue passionately and not altogether unpersuasively that municipal water agencies like Baltimore City's Department of Public Works should never shut off water as a means to force payment of overdue residential bills. We don't go that far — after all, allowing some to abuse the system increases the costs to everyone else, including those who must make sacrifices to pay what they owe. But if a water system is going to pursue shut-offs, it needs to go about it in the fairest, most equitable and transparent way possible. So far, Baltimore's public works department is failing on those counts.
Two inequities jump out from Sun reporter Luke Broadwater's recent article on the shut offs:
•Of the $40 million in badly delinquent bills the city is attempting to address through shut-off notices, $15 million can be attributed to large commercial accounts. Some of those businesses have made payments or entered payment plans, but the amount collected from them totals just $1.1 million so far. By contrast, individual customers had paid $6 million as of Friday — a more than twice-larger percentage of their total debt than the businesses. Yet not a single one of the commercial customers has been shut off.
•About half of the water system's customers live in Baltimore County, but county residents make up a much smaller percentage of those whose bills are sufficiently overdue to trigger a shut-off notice. About 21,000 of the delinquent customers, representing $28 million in overdue bills, are in the city. Only about 4,000 of the accounts, representing $13 million in bills, are in the county. The comparison is more stark when you consider that more than half of the past-due amount for the county, $7.3 million, is from the defunct Sparrows Point steel mill. Yet 90 percent of the shut-offs have gone to county residents.
DPW spokesman Jeffrey Raymond reiterated today that the department will shut off commercial customers who do not pay, likely by the end of the month, after making sure they are aware of the bills and giving them a chance to respond. "We want to make sure we've done and they've done everything we can," he said. But the same is theoretically true for residential customers, yet the shut-off process is moving much faster for them. Mr. Raymond noted that the physical task of shutting off water to a large commercial customer is more difficult than for a residence and that it is something the department has not done before. But from the simple standpoint of effort vs. reward — if not social justice — starting with individuals' accounts doesn't make much sense. Bills for the large commercial customers average in the tens of thousands of dollars, more than 30 times greater than the average for residential customers. Why not start with those who owe the most?
As for the city-county disparity, Mr. Raymond said the department decided to focus initially on enforcement in the county because of a policy against pursuing shut-offs to homes that are also subject of possible tax sale, which in Baltimore occurs during the spring.
What appears abundantly clear here is that those with the loudest voices are getting the most consideration and those with the least say are getting none. Big commercial customers have the wherewithal to challenge their bills — Sparrows Point's owners at one point took a billing dispute all the way to the Maryland Court of Special Appeals — and can seemingly hold off enforcement indefinitely. Baltimore City residents have the ability to complain to the mayor or their representatives on the City Council. Baltimore County residents have nothing. The 203 people who have had their service cut off in Dundalk can complain to County Councilman Todd Crandall, and he can do what he did, which is to ask public works officials to look into the matter. But those officials know he won't ever be raking them over the coals during a budget hearing. Baltimore County also has tax sales — though, thanks to a history of somewhat more enlightened laws, fewer of them — yet the department has no policy of accommodation to county customers who find themselves in that situation.
"The status quo will not work," Donald Mohler, a spokesman for County Executive Kevin Kamenetz said today . "We have had ongoing discussions [with the city] that are now intensifying, looking at the entire process to decide what both sides need to do going forward."
That needs to happen because when it comes to something so fundamental as water, everyone needs an equal say.