Earlier this year, media outlets in Kansas City took brief note of a consent decree entered into by Kansas City, Mo., and the U.S. Department of Justice. The upshot of it: The city would commit to a long-term—and expensive—program of improving storm-water runoff and reducing the amount of raw sewage and other pollutants swept into the region’s waterways during heavy rainstorms.
As quickly as it made headlines, the story subsided. Much like the underground infrastructure it dealt with, the issue was, in the words of Daniel McCarthy, global water services president for engineering firm Black and Veatch, “out of sight, out of mind.”
It won’t stay there.
The decree calls for Kansas City to implement a $2.5 billion program to bring its storm-water management into compliance with federal regulations. That’s an average of $100 million every year for a quarter-century, in a community that has been grappling with grim general-fund budget pictures for years, and with a deferred-maintenance backlog already running in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
That outmoded storm-water system is just one segment of the region’s water-management assets, which McCarthy collectively calls “a ticking time bomb” for the costs they are imposing on the region. Kansas City, after all, isn’t the lone municipality involved; more than two dozen others in the area rely on it for their water-servicing needs.
There’s another cost consideration with that infrastructure, as well: The nation’s freshwater supplies are becoming part of the new sustainability calculus, economic-development tools that separate communities into the haves from have-nots of water. Infrastructure failures are not only wasting clean water, but raising the costs of energy to treat it, putting the region at a competitive disadvantage for business recruitment.
A Matter of Perspective
John Mitchell, director of the wastewater practice for Burns and McDonnell, said decades of neglecting the true costs of system maintenance had helped get us into this fix.
“For Kansas City and the region—really, for the entire country—I think one of our biggest challenges is that, culturally, we have undervalued our water resources and our water infrastructure,” Mitchell said. “Throughout the history of water utilities, wastewater utilities, storm-water utilities, we have always sought to absolutely minimize the cost of that resource to our ratepayers.”
One reason for that: Public officials haven’t viewed those assets the way a business owner might.
“In private industry,” Mitchell said, “when an investment in an asset is made, we plan for its design, construction, installation, operations and maintenance. We also price its depreciation, or the cost of what it’s going to take to replace that.
“On the public side, we do all of those things except the depreciation and planning for replacement of those assets.”
If there’s an upside to where Kansas City finds itself, engineering professionals say, it’s that virtually every other major city that competes with this region for business retention, attraction, growth and development is in the same swamped boat.
But the competitive threat to Kansas City, says Columbia-based water-policy author Ken Midkiff, isn’t necessarily limited to peer communities. In Moberly, Mo.—40 miles from the nearest interstate—ground was recently broken on a $46 million plant for making sucralose, a substitute sweetener. Columbia, too, had recently pulled in a new IBM facility, he said. Each location decision, Midkiff said, involved assessments of the local supporting infrastructure.
“When you talk competitiveness, St. Louis is dying from the inside out, and in some ways, Kansas City resembles St. Louis,” Midkiff said. “They are not competing with cities of similar size, but competing with cities a tenth of the size of Kansas City—and losing.”
The Water Maze
The Kansas City region’s water infrastructure consists of three elements: Water supply, wastewater treatment, and storm-water runoff and management. Blessed with two rivers meeting in its center, the city has fewer issues with access to water, local engineering professionals say. The system for delivering that supply? That’s another story, they say. Among the issues facing the region:
• Infrastructure quality. Water lines, both for fresh-water supply and for wastewater and storm runoff, are falling apart in some areas, including some of those best-suited to large-scale industrial customers. Though it has adequate sources of water from the Missouri River and wells in its alluvium, Kansas City is cursed with hundreds of water line breaks every spring as the ground thaws and heats up into summer. In addition, decades of financial shortcuts that piggy-backed construction of storm-water systems onto sewer lines have helped create conditions that will saddle Kansas City ratepayers for decades, as with the consent decree over storm-water runoff.
• Aggregated costs. Older storm sewer systems, primarily in the urban core’s two Kansas Cities, are now a multi-billion-dollar regional headache. For Kansas City, Mo., that means significant increases in its rate structures, which could discourage industrial relocation and impede efforts to produce jobs.
• Jurisdiction. And there’s the long-standing issue that has been like plaque building in the economic development arteries of this region for decades: a state line dividing the community. Related to that are the sheer numbers of municipalities and utilities with their own networks of pipelines for supply and treatment.
Those are problems, says Dennis Cantrell, president of water services for HNTB, that are not unique to Kansas City. “Through HNTB, we’ve worked on major sewer programs in six or seven major cites over the past decade,” Cantrell said. “I would say the conditions here are just about the same.”
Nonetheless, communities in the region, he said, would have a hard time catching up on the amount of maintenance that’s been deferred for years in short-sighted efforts to rein in municipal spending.
“The big challenge for communities,” Can-trell said, “is the financing of improvements needed, the rehabilitation of what’s in place, as well as the ability to fund growth and expansion, to keep those services expanding for the growth of the community.”
Moving Forward
Rich Noll, Kansas City’s acting director of water services, says it’s too late to argue about what was done—or not done—in the past.
Getting the system corrected now, he said of the overflow-control issue, “is one of those things we’re going to have to do. People are going to see significant growth in their wastewater bill—for five years, 15 percent increases each year, which will decline somewhat thereafter. That’s going to be something felt both by residential and commercial customers.
“But if we don’t do it, there’s a variety of water quality issues that are going to create problems for us, like unsanitary conditions with frequent overflows. It’s a trade-off, but fortunately, the EPA has given us 25 years so we can at least moderate the cost.”
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