The Water Reckoning: Why Local Leaders Shouldn’t Wait to Act
“We’re all Flint, Michigan, now,” Chelsea Boozer, executive director for Rogue Water Lab, a national nonprofit focused on engaging communities to bolster trust in water, told me. She wasn’t being dramatic—just honest.
Even communities with safe, well run systems are finding that public trust has eroded. Residents question rate increases. They’re skeptical of infrastructure projects. And when something does go wrong—a boil notice, a main break, a spike in bills—years of behind-the-scenes work can unravel in days.
This is no longer just a utility management issue. It’s a leadership issue.
A big part of the problem: Water infrastructure hasn’t been treated as a political priority. It’s essential, but not flashy. It’s often taken for granted while the true costs of upkeep, modernization, and resilience are quietly ignored. Now that neglect has caught up with us. Decades of underinvestment have pushed water systems across the country to a breaking point.
This is no longer just a utility management issue. It’s a leadership issue. If you’re a mayor, city manager, finance director, or county executive, it’s time to put water on the front burner. No city can thrive if its water system is failing.
A Slow-Moving Crisis Turns Urgent
Communities’ underinvestment in water infrastructure has a long history. “We’ve been deferring maintenance for 50 years,” said Jessica Williams, the CFO for the City of Denton, Texas. “Now we’re staring down a generational capital backlog.”
Williams noted Denton’s upcoming $195 million plant expansion—an investment needed to increase capacity due to growth. Projects of this nature are becoming too large for some communities to afford, requiring new approaches to funding infrastructure in the future.
Next door in Oklahoma, the state’s Water Resources Board is currently overseeing $2.2 billion in loans across 191 projects, with a total of $8.2 billion in loans across nearly 2,900 projects during the lifetime of the program. However, the estimated statewide need is far greater: with a growing estimate of $24 billion in current demand, and up to $90 billion over the next 50 years for water supply, wastewater, and flood infrastructure
As Robby Short, the Board’s legislative liaison, explained, while the American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) delivered a short-term boost, “it barely scratched the surface.” The ARPA funding allocated to Oklahoma’s water and wastewater systems amounted to just $479.79 million—less than 2% of the state’s documented long-term need.
Meanwhile, the pressures have kept growing:
- Aging infrastructure is failing faster than it can be replaced.
- Climate-related storms, floods, and freeze events are overwhelming systems not designed for extreme weather.
- Regulatory demands around PFAS (the so-called “forever chemicals”) and lead are adding cost and complexity.
- And the federal funding outlook is uncertain, with proposed cuts threatening EPA’s state revolving funds.
This is the context in which local leaders must act. But they need to act wisely.
“The worst thing that could happen—and it happens a lot—is freezing water rates,” said communications consultant Mike McGill, president of WaterPIO, a public communications firm focused on water utilities. “A zero percent increase is a self-inflicted wound.”
Yet many local officials do exactly that. Boozer said she’s heard mayors “bragging they haven’t raised rates in 20 years.” That’s a disservice to their communities, she said. “If rate setting is left entirely to elected officials, it becomes a budget game.”
The True Cost of Delay
Postponing investment doesn’t make the problem go away—it multiplies it. Will Pickering, CEO of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, put it plainly: “We’re still replacing infrastructure from the 1800s.”
Like many older cities, Pittsburgh replaces only about 1% of its water mains annually. “If your pipes are 90 years old, and you’re replacing 1% per year, you’ll always have 90-year-old pipes,” he said.
At the same time, regulatory uncertainty looms. The EPA’s evolving standards on PFAS and lead remediation are already driving major capital costs—and for smaller utilities, those costs can be overwhelming.
The American Water Works Association’s 2025 State of the Water Industry report found that capital needs now top the list of sector concerns and that most utilities expect to fall short of the investment required to maintain service levels over the next five years.
The Soft Skills Are the Hardest
Even when utilities get the engineering and operations right, they often stumble on the people part. “We call them soft skills, but they’re actually the hardest part of the job,” said Chelsea Boozer. “That’s why we don’t do them.”
Public communication, stakeholder engagement and transparency all are central to water governance. As AWWA’s Water 2050 One Water Governance Report emphasizes, governance isn’t just about compliance and structure; it’s about building trust, managing risk, and ensuring that decisions reflect both the public good and long-term system needs.
Unfortunately, too few local governments treat communication and engagement as core functions of water management. “If your community doesn’t understand why investment is necessary,” Boozer noted, “they’ll assume mismanagement.”
The AWWA’s data backs that up, suggesting that public understanding of the value of water systems is now a top-five concern. Yet only 63% of utilities have a formal customer communications plan in place.
Water is Life – Let’s Make it the Priority it Must Be
Water utilities are facing a perfect storm: aging infrastructure, rising costs, shrinking federal support, increasingly severe weather, and deepening public mistrust. In this era of fend-for-yourself federalism, the burden falls on local governments to lead—and that means budgeting strategically, engaging transparently, and planning for the long haul.
As Will Pickering put it, “If we wait until it’s a crisis, it’s already too late. The work has to start now.”
He’s right. If you’re a mayor, city manager, county executive or CFO, now is the time to bring water into the center of your strategic, financial, and community priorities. Water is life—and the systems that deliver it are your responsibility to protect.