The city of Flint, Michigan must stop shutting off water to homes and businesses with accounts in arrears and cut the rate it charges for water service by a third, a circuit court judge ordered Monday. City officials are warning that the injunction puts Flint back on the brink of insolvency just months after the city officially escaped from a nearly 3.5-year financial state of emergency.
Unless the city’s planned appeal of the order is successful, Monday’s move will spare tenants at 13,000 separate homes and businesses from pending water shutoffs in the ailing rust belt town. Judge Archie Hayman ruled that a 2011 water rate hike was illegal and must be reversed, and ordered Flint officials into negotiations with plaintiffs in the case over how to restore nearly $16 million to the city’s sewer fund that was redirected in 2007.
Water shutoffs such as those enjoined by Monday’s order have been a flashpoint in Detroit, drawing negative attention and spurring costly legal disputes. Detroit’s problems with water bill collections were driven in part by large increases in the rate the city charges residents for service. But compared to what Flint did, Detroit’s 119 percent hike over 10 years seems downright gentle.
The 2011 rate hike of 35 percent imposed by Flint’s leaders took effect all at once, breaking a separate city law requiring all water rate hikes to be incremental over a year.
Hayman’s order also requires the city to find a way to return $15.7 million that was taken out of the city’s water and sewer budget in 2007. Flint made that transfer to pay out damages to over 100 residents who had sued the city after sewage backed up into their homes all the way back in 2000 and 2001.
Flint has already frozen hiring for city jobs, fearing the budget implications of the judge’s order. Flint narrowly avoided Detroit’s fate of going into bankruptcy court, and spent over three years under a state-appointed emergency manager. The city came out of receivership in April with its finances delicately poised. That balance could crumble under the combined effect of transferring $16 million back into the water and sewer system budget and losing the authority to bill customers at the higher, illegally imposed water rate.
Both the city’s handling of the sewer backups case and the sudden 35 percent water rate hike reflect a more fundamental problem for Flint. With more than 500 miles of sewer pipe for a city of fewer than 100,000 people, Flint’s water system is vast, ancient, and decrepit. Fixing a single mile of pipe costs an estimated $200,000. The immense cost of actually fixing the system makes strategies that would otherwise seem foolish — like fighting a losing battle to defend the system’s finances in court, or demanding a sudden, rapid price jump from citizens who may not be able to afford it — become almost logical.
The city’s sprawling sewer system is a byproduct of its sprawling physical geography. Rust belt towns that grew outward during boom times must now shrink physically in order to achieve the population density they need to be economically viable. Detroit and Flint have each defied that urban planning imperative even after the U.S. auto industry hit on hard times: The two cities continued to lead the nation in sprawl rate during the 2000–2010 decade.
Sewer systems are a particularly acute example of the harm sprawl wreaks. They can be so expensive to maintain that a struggling city simple can’t keep up. When Detroit began cutting off water service to homes and businesses last year, critics asserted that the city was depriving residents of a basic human right instead of simply fixing the leaking pipes that cost it billions of gallons of drinking water each year. Detroit’s water system will now be managed by a regional water authority primarily ruled by appointees from the surrounding counties, under a deal that helped resolve the city’s bankruptcy.
Such shifts in water authority can be messy, as Flint itself has learned in recent years. The city had received its water through Detroit’s system until 2014, when it broke off and began drawing its own water from the Flint River. The move saved Flint millions of dollars per year. But it also piped a toxin called TTHM into Flint’s households. Tests in 2014 and 2015 found illegally high and unsafe levels of the chemical, but residents didn’t get an official notice that their water was unsafe for 10 months after the first testing failures.