Many communities’ water and sewer rates are rising faster than inflation as utilities invest heavily to upgrade, expand and repair critical infrastructure.
That can pose hardships to lower-income customers, and utilities often compensate by offering what are commonly called customer assistance programs. But how effective are those programs? And how well do utilities and cities perform in signing people up for the help they need?
Oliver Morrison, a general assignment reporter at WESA, the National Public Radio affiliate in Pittsburgh, has explored those questions in a series of feature stories. For his efforts, he received a 2024 Media and Education Medal from the Water Environment Federation.
Morrison taught English and theater in the Arkansas Delta for seven years before making a career change to journalism in 2013. His experience includes covering breaking news and weekend features for the Wichita Eagle in Kansas, reporting in New York for local and national publications including City Limits and The Atlantic, and covering education, environment and health for PublicSource in Pittsburgh.
Morrison is a graduate of Deep Springs College, the University of Oxford, and the City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. In an interview with Treatment Plant Operator, he discussed his work related to customer assistance programs and shared thoughts on how utility staff members can build productive relationships with news media.
TPO: Which utilities did you examine for your report on customer assistance programs?
Morrison: I mostly looked at the four largest utilities in Pittsburgh and the suburbs, which are Pennsylvania American Water, Pittsburgh Water, the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, and the Wilkinsburg-Penn Joint Water Authority.
TPO: What has been happening to water and sewer rates in the area you cover?
Morrison: In the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority, which includes Pittsburgh, sewer rates have increased by 7% per year since almost a decade ago. The plan is to continue raising them at that pace at least until 2036, and probably beyond. The increase in water rates in the area has been a little less, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the long-term average isn’t close to that 7%. It’s surprising to me that there hasn’t been more of an outcry, but because rates keep going up and up, I do suspect that more people will be paying attention to this.
TPO: What are some of the key factors putting upward pressure on rates?
Morrison: We have combined sanitary and storm sewer systems in most of the area, so they’re trying to prevent sewage overflows from getting into the rivers. It has been a long-delayed EPA process involving multi-billion dollars. Now they’re moving forward with increasing the size of the major wastewater treatment plants and building underground storage tunnels. We also had a lead-in-drinking-water crisis here in 2016, and there has been a large investment in replacing lead lines to make the drinking water systems more secure.
TPO: Has PFAS been a significant issue in the region?
Morrison: There hasn’t been a lot of PFAS contamination in drinking water systems here on the west side of the state. In the Philadelphia suburban area, there are some military bases that had contamination that ended up in the water supply. We do have some contamination around our airport and in some smaller pockets, but PFAS has not been a major driver of costs in our region.
TPO: What has been the focus of your reporting around customer assistance programs?
Morrison: I’ve been writing about every two years on how well drinking water and wastewater companies are doing at getting their customers to sign up for low-income assistance programs. As part of that, I’ve looked at which municipalities and utilities have been more or less generous. Typically, I feature a person or family that has been a beneficiary and the impact it has if they sign up for an assistance program.
TPO: What do customer assistance programs typically look like?
Morrison: There are a few mechanisms. Some have just a certain annual hardship amount. Others have programs where customers get more or less benefit depending on their income. Some may offer a one-off bill reduction; others may provide a percentage off of each 1,000 gallons or the basic change. Some have separate programs for drinking water and sewage. Some have benefits for only one of those entities.
TPO: In summary, what have you discovered through your investigations?
Morrison: I found there were some utilities where the benefits they offered were increasing over time, and some where the benefits had not kept up with the cost of the utility bills. Some utilities that had hired staff specifically to improve their customer assistance programs were doing a better job at increasing sign-ups, whereas utilities that didn’t seem to have a particular staff member assigned had variation and sometimes were getting worse over time.
TPO: What distinguished those utilities doing better with low-income assistance?
Morrison: It started at the top. The executives at utilities that were doing better were making it a priority. They were talking about it in their messaging. They had hired staff members specific to the issue. When customers would call because of a bill problem, there was a specific team instructed on how to respond to them. They were also proactively reaching out to certain customers. The gist of it was that they had people proactively working on it, and the work was being supported and promoted, from the highest levels of the organization on down.
TPO: Where did the lower-performing utilities tend to fall short?
Morrison: It seemed to me that in the utilities that were not doing as well, the board was not paying attention to the programs, and the executives weren’t prioritizing them. It’s not that they were doing no messaging around it, but it didn’t seem that there was anyone specifically responsible for the success of the programs. The messaging was ineffective, they weren’t signing up as many people, and they weren’t noticing whether the level of assistance was going up. It was a managerial problem.
TPO: Was performance on these programs in any way related to utility size?
Morrison: My impression was that the larger ones maybe were better on the whole, but one of the worst performers was also a larger one, so I don’t know if you can draw any conclusions based on utility size.
TPO: What specific kinds of outreach were the most effective in encouraging customer participation?
Morrison: My impression was that the two biggest ways of signing people up were direct outreach by phone, and then having the information prominently displayed and easy to find and navigate on the websites.
TPO: How did the phone outreach programs work?
Morrison: They would reach out to people proactively, and they would also have a script in place for when customers called in with problems. One utility had a team of about five people assigned to the program.
TPO: Did you see any specific opportunities to significantly increase participation?
Morrison: It seems to me that the biggest potential area for growth is coordination between water and sewer utilities and other utilities in our area. It felt like there was not enough cooperation between water and sewer utilities. Even when they were sharing billing practices, they weren’t necessarily doing their best to work off each other to sign people up for these programs. My understanding is that some work is being done at the state level to make it easier for customers already signed up for electric and gas assistance to be signed up for water, sewer and stormwater assistance programs as well. In addition, an activist group has been running a campaign to push for some of these programs, and it has been an important part of why some utilities have been making changes.
TPO: Based on your experience, what do you observe about utilities that work effectively with the news media?
Morrison: The good ones respond to my calls quickly. They answer all my questions; they don’t hold back. They don’t make the process of finding public records onerous. They check in with me regularly. They build the relationship. They don’t do anything that hints at being closed or hiding something.
TPO: What about those that work with you less effectively?
Morrison: It’s essentially the opposite. They don’t respond to records requests; they make you go through the appeals process. They don’t make their employees available for interviews. They often are curt or argumentative. As a journalist, sometimes that makes me want to work harder to find out what is going on there. What are they hiding? I believe utilities that are more open and more proactive about their communications tend to come across better in these articles.
