Detroit has 5,000 homes without water: New pilot program only helps 70

Roughly half the Detroiters who lost water service this year are still living without water. 

That's 11,813 shutoffs this year, the Detroit Water and Sewerage Department says, with around 5,118 Detroit households still disconnected. The water department believes that 4,470 of those households are occupied.

This is nuts. 

Wednesday, the Detroit water department is presenting a pilot program to the city's Board of Water Commissioners that would connect delinquent customers with resources. The pilot program, a kind of test run before launching a full scale effort, would accommodate about 70 delinquent customers, a department spokesman says, and would aim to connect those delinquent water customers with other social safety net benefits like food and utility assistance, home repair funds, job training or financial literacy help, freeing up money to pay the water bill. 

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It's a great plan. But we're in year six of a crisis, with 4,470 occupied homes without water, and I am absolutely mystified that this is what we're starting now. 

Why you should care, if you're not a Detroiter whose water is shut off 

Because you have empathy, and this is a humanitarian crisis.

When Detroit started shutting off delinquent water accounts en masse, my son was just out of diapers and still in daycare. I washed my hands diligently during those early years, and still spent more time sick than I had in the rest of my life. And I had running water. Can you imagine trying to raise your child in a home without water? To care and feed for that child, and to keep all the members of your household clean and safe? 

"The reason there was a public water department in the first place was because so many people were dying from disease and medical conditions from unclean water," said Detroit attorney Alice Jennings, of Edwards & Jennings P.C. Jennings is part of a coalition, including the ACLU of Michigan, the Maurice & Jane Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice and the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, that asked the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services last month to require the department to suspend shutoffs.

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"There are people suffering right now, little kids that don’t have water, seniors, they dehydrate. We’re talking about medical issues that develop because their hands aren’t being properly washed," Jennings said.

Jennings said she's met with one family of eight that's been without water for two years. 

"Here we are in a community of people where there’s a projection of two Detroits. We're the comeback city, but how do you come back when you’ve got thousands of people living without water?"

Why is this happening?

Six years ago, the Detroit water department got really aggressive about shutoffs. Back then, the unemployment rate in Detroit was was almost 18%. Almost 40% of Detroiters live in poverty, per the U.S. Census, a figure that's relatively consistent. The Detroit unemployment rate as of June, was 9.3%, points ahead of the state and national average. If you're wondering why some Detroiters don't just pay their bills, this is why. 

And for decades, the department tolerated unpaid bills, signalling to water customers that other financial needs could be met first. Former Detroit emergency manager Kevyn Orr changed that in 2014, citing roughly $90 million in overdue accounts owed by 90,000 customers. Orr was right to recognize that it was not a sustainable situation. But the department didn't do much outreach to let customers know that its shutoff practices were changing. And it didn't launch the kind of program it's looking at now. 

More than 112,000 households were disconnected between 2014 and 2018, the coalition says. 

The water department has said that most customers reconnect within days of a shutoff. 

That's not happening this year. 

In past years, the department paused water shutoffs during the winter. But data showed that if the department stopped shutting off water service, delinquencies went up. So now the department shuts off water year-round, but only for "illegal hookups, meter non-compliance (not given access to repair/exchange a faulty meter) and commercial accounts," a water department spokesman said. 

Most Detroiters pay their bills on time

Detroit's water department has 149,961 active accounts. As of Aug. 1, the department reports, 11% of those accounts are in payment plans.

The department offers two payment plans: its WRAP (Water Residential Assistance Program) plan is intended for the lowest-income water customers; 3,937 are enrolled in WRAP plans.

The 10-30-50 plan requires customers to pay percentages of the overdue balance at set periods, and 13,008 residential households were enrolled in those plans.

That pilot program

The pilot program that will be announced today, will be offered to 70 customers, who don't qualify for the WRAP or 10-30-50 payment plans, in Detroit's 48234 ZIP code, which is bounded roughly north to south from 8 Mile Road to Nevada Avenue, and east to west from Hoover to Dequindre. The department says there are a lot of water shutoffs in that area. 

The pilot program is a collaboration between the water department and the Detroit Health Department, and will employ a caseworker and a part-time employee to do outreach, with a budget of $150,000, and $25,000 earmarked for debt forgiveness across the program's participants, which averages out to $360 per account. 

Detroiters who participate will stop getting shutoff notices, and be eligible for debt forgiveness at the end of the program. 

The department will also continue its efforts to make Detroit homes more water efficient: Analyzing water use to identify homes with leaky pipes, replacing old toilets that consume excessive amounts of water. 

Again, these are worthwhile objectives. 

And they would have been great to launch alongside the shutoff crackdown, back in 2014. 

Department spokesman Bryan Peckinpaugh says it took the department a while to understand what was needed, and to understand that WRAP wasn't sufficient to meet the needs of Detroit's most impoverished residents. 

Jennings calls the proposed pilot program "damningly inadequate." 

"Seventy people," she said. "There are people suffering right now."

There is something we could do 

There's something that nearly everyone agrees would be a genuinely helpful solution for Detroit: tiered rates. 

Right now, everybody pays the same rate for water, regardless of whether they can afford it or not. Tiered rates would set costs based on household income. Some folks have argued that tiered rates would be illegal, pointing to a 1998 Michigan Supreme Court case, in which the court ruled that cities couldn't fund some costs with user fees. Utilities have since been wary of policy decisions that could fall into this category. 

Jennings says it's not, and some folks at the water department agree. Legislation that would specifically allow for tiered rates has been introduced by a group of Democratic state senators, but has not moved out of committee. 

If you charge people a rate they can actually afford, they'll pay — and that means some utilities have improved collections by charging less. 

It seems unlikely that this problem is going to fix itself. So finding some solutions is important. 

Nancy Kaffer is a Free Press columnist. Contact: nkaffer@freepress.com.