Mandate
DO NOT PRIVATIZE WATER UTILITY. Do not permit water mining by
bottlers. Pass a moratorium until sustainability is researched for a
doubled population with twice the pollution across the watershed in 20
years.
Steps:
1. Think globally and act locally.
2. Municipalities are happy to have citizens petition at monthly board meetings. WELCOME! We walk on to speak for 5 minutes and hand in this Water Bill Mandate with weblinks. Individual citizens walk into supervisors meeting across America in 60,000 townships.
3. Municipal officials view themselves as public servants working on the good neighbor’s behest. They expect citizen walk-ons. This is not the case in state and federal houses.
4. Municipalities have felt abandoned by state and federal regulators and cringe at citizen rebuke. Why not congratulate them instead for delivering water to the tap practically without charge.
5. Municipalities know that they own the rights to the water utility under eminent domain.
6. Municipalities are irritated at the deteriorating infrastructure of their public utility and nervous about raising rates to fix it, but water rates are wonderfully low right now at a dollar and change for 1000 gallons. Raising the rates to fix infrastructure will still make rates practically ‘free’ only if we stay public.
7. If water goes private the rates will be deregulated soon and start to look like gasoline prices at over 3 dollars a gallon.
8. Congress challenged oil CEOs making 600 million dollars a year for themselves - who answered ‘ market force scarcity.’ Clean water is going to be scarce for 2/3 of the world’s population in 20 years. Privateers will gouge profit, if public utilities sell our water commons.