An independent water authority whose service area includes a municipality in fiscal distress received an offer from a private company to purchase the water system but wants to study if a sale is in the “…best interest of its customers“.
No, this is not Pittsburgh and the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority (PWSA), but way over in the southeastern corner of Pennsylvania with the Chester Water Authority, which serves the City of Chester along with other municipalities in other counties. The Authority has 42,000 customers, about half of what is served by the PWSA. For the customer base and the existing pipeline (656 miles) the Chester Authority was offered $250 million at a meeting this week. That offer was rejected and the Authority board then agreed to conduct an analysis of what a sale would mean for customers. Some of those customers that attended the meeting were not interested in the idea, and the Authority has provided a comparison of its rates to other private companies.
In Pittsburgh there is the unique situation in that there is already a private utility presence in the south hills section of the City (see slide 1 of this presentation), and the rates of customers served by the utility are subsidized so that their rates would be identical to PWSA rates (see slide 8). So even though there is a private presence in the City of Pittsburgh the opposition to “privatization” has been evident (see here, here, and here for example). The direction in Pittsburgh has been for a “restructuring” of the PWSA with a consultant and a blue ribbon panel.
