Activists Call For UN Intervention As Government Moves To Shut Off Water In Detroit

As the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department moves to shut off water to thousands of residents who are delinquent on their bills, a coalition of activists is appealing to the United Nations High Commission for Human Rights to intervene on behalf of the bankrupt city’s most vulnerable citizens.

Their report, filed Wednesday with the UN’s Special Rapporteur on the Human Right to Safe Drinking Water and Sanitation, alleges that the DWSD crackdown is part of an effort “to sweeten the pot for a private investor” to take over the city’s heavily-indebted water and sewer system as part of Detroit’s broader bankruptcy proceedings.
 
One of the activist groups behind the report, the Detroit People’s Water Board, notes that city residents have seen water rates more than double over the past decade at the same time that the city’s poverty rate rose to nearly 40 percent, putting the cost of basic running water beyond reach for tens of thousands of households. Earlier this week, city lawmakers voted to raise water rates by a further 8.7 percent.
 
Almost exactly 50 percent of the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department’s 323,900 total accounts were delinquent as of March,according to the Detroit News (via Nexis), with a combined $175 million in unpaid water bills outstanding. The department announced at that time that it would begin an aggressive campaign of water shutoffs, and a DWSD spokesman said that it has shut off water to nearly 7,000 separate clients since the beginning of April. DWSD mailed warnings about the shutoffs in March, but the People’s Water Board report says that some residents it interviewed either never received a warning notice or had their water shut off before the payment deadline printed in the notices had passed.
 
One key piece of the activists’ complaint has to do with allegedly disparate treatment of residential and commercial clients by the DWSD. The People’s Water Board claims that delinquent business entities “have not been targeted in the same way as residential users,” a claim the department strongly disputes.
 
“There are no sacred cows. We aren’t discriminating in terms of individuals or businesses,” DWSD spokesman Bill Johnson said in an interview. “Last month we shut off about 3,600 accounts, both businesses and residential. Everybody is getting cut off who is $150 or 60 days in arrears. That is our policy and we’re ramping up our enforcement of that policy.”
 
The department has not yet had time to break out the data on water shutoffs by client category, Johnson said, but he hopes to be able to report exact figures on the number of business clients who have lost water access soon.
 
The DWSD’s roughly $5 billion in debts have turned out to be the most difficult piece of Detroit’s bankruptcy, after initially seeming to be on track for a rapid resolution. Neighboring counties have balked at absorbing the city system into a regional water and sewer authority, and subsequent plans to privatize the city’s water services have been criticized as too rapid, too costly, and too damaging to residents’ quality of life. The system’s massive backlog of delinquent bills makes it harder to convince anyone, whether private company or public authority, to shoulder the DWSD’s obligations. But if the water shutoffs were aimed at making the department look like a shinier prize in bankruptcy negotiations, they would likely be targeted at corporate clients directly, for the same reason that Depression-era gangsters robbed banks: that’s where the money is.
 
While the vast majority of the nearly 165,000 delinquent accounts reported in March are residential clients, those private households owe much smaller amounts than the commercial and industrial clients who are delinquent on their DWSD bills. Fewer than 11,000 delinquent accounts relate to commercial or industrial clients. But those delinquencies average more than $7,700 per business, according to the numbers published in the Detroit News in March, compared to an average debt of less than $600 per residential delinquency. Non-residential clients account for almost half of what DWSD is owed despite being less than 7 percent of total delinquencies, according to the March figures. The People’s Water Board says that it obtained a docuмent showing similar figures, but did not respond to a request for the docuмent by press time.
 
It is not clear what action the activists seek from the UN Human Rights Commission. A request for comment from the UN official to whom the report was submitted went unanswered.

And foreign aid should be stopped too.

Marsha

People need water to live. This stop these overseas wars and use the money
to help our own people.

Are you some kind of radical, RC1953?    :dancing-banana:   'cause mega corporations don't see it that way.  
Bechtel, Veolia, Nestle, Coca Cola have been privatizing water all over the globe for years, and discussion of privatization in California has increased dramatically recently.  Neil O can probably speak to that.

Who has been financing worldwide privatization?

The World Bank serves the interests of water companies both through its regular loan programs to governments, which often come with conditions that explicitly require the privatization of water provision, and through its private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation, which invests in privatization projects and makes loans to companies carrying them out. Lending about $20 billion to water supply projects over the last decade, the World Bank has been the principle financer of privatization. A year-long study by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, a project of the Washington-based Center for Public Integrity, released in February, 2003, found that the majority of World Bank loans for water in the last five years have required the conversion of public systems to private as a condition for the transaction. The performance of these companies in Europe and the developing world has been well docuмented: huge profits, higher prices for water, cut-offs to customers who cannot pay, little transparency in their dealings, reduced water quality, bribery, and corruption.

http://www.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/209/43398.html

The water should be shut off. They can use the public park and public restrooms. My guess is that the vast majority of the freeloaders will pony up once the water is shut off.

These people are playing a game. They can go bathe in the river. If they can afford to eat then they can also pay the water connection to their home.

Here is the game- in better times the utility could force the owner to pay for the service by placing a lean on the property. Now, since property has zero value in Detroit people think they can steal and freeload without consequences.

My guess is 80% of the freeloaders will pay once they realized the alternative is bathing in Lake Michigan.

It’s not a stretch to guess the reason delinquency rates are lower for cable and cellphone service is that the cable and telephone companies cut off customers who don’t pay their bills. The Detroit water department hasn’t done that much, until now.

I hadn't realized that this was such a non-story until this. So, the Detroit water department finally screwed their heads on straight. Where I live, your water is turned off after only 1 missed payment. They claim there's something like a $25 fee to get it turned back on. I'm not interested in testing the system, but I noted the neighbors across the street of our last home had their water turned off and on pretty much every other month.