On Dec. 8, Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan and Water and Sewerage Department Director Gary Brown announced that the extension of the moratorium on water shutoffs that went into effect under the COVID-19 emergency will continue through 2022.
This extension was won through persistent struggle by activists from We the People Detroit, People’s Water Board, Michigan Welfare Rights Organization, Hydrate Detroit, Moratorium Now! Coalition, and others. Since 2014, these forces have fought against the disastrous effects of 141,000 water shutoffs in a city of 672,000 people.
But water warriors are greeting the mayor and Brown’s announcement with skepticism and mistrust. Coming from the perpetrators of the mass water shutoffs, the moratorium extension was opportunistically announced the evening before Duggan, the city’s first white mayor since the election of Coleman A. Young in 1974, made known his reelection bid.
Poorest Detroiters without water
The water shutoff moratorium is tied to Detroiters with incomes below 200 percent of the federal poverty level getting assistance from available programs, particularly the Water Residential Assistance Program and 10/30/50. Both of these programs allow for postponement of payments on past due bills, with the WRAP program paying off some, but not all, of the arrearages.
Duggan and Brown claim funding has been secured for Detroiters to receive the assistance due to them under these programs. But they don’t say where that funding will come from. In fact, it is only because the city of Detroit and DWSD received $9 million in federal emergency COVID-19 relief funds that WRAP was able to offer residents some assistance this year. The mayor’s announcement notes that only $1 million remains in the fund through the fiscal year ending 2021.
Households will still owe their full bills
The announcement states that the moratorium is not a payment amnesty and that residential households will still owe their full bills. In other words, when the moratorium ends, or if the city decides to end it early, massive water shutoffs will again ensue.
The city’s announcement is silent on whether unpaid water bills will still be attached as property liens subject to home foreclosure. Water activists also dispute the city’s account that restoring water to 1,300 occupied homes post-COVID-19 resolved the immediate shutoff crisis, noting that as of January 2020, more than 9,000 homes were without water.
City: ‘Water shutoffs don’t create health crisis’
From 2018 to 2020, Detroiters victimized by water shutoffs were represented by attorneys from the ACLU, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and Edwards & Jennings, PC, among others, along with the People’s Water Board, in an unsuccessful petition aimed at the Detroit Health Department, DWSD, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer to put a stop to Detroit water shutoffs due to the public health emergency they created.
In response to the petition, Denise Fair, Detroit’s so-called health director, preposterously stated, “There is no clear data to suggest whether or not there are other health risks related to water service interruptions.” As late as Feb. 21, Whitmer, a darling of the liberal Democratic Party establishment, denied the petition, incredulously stating that, “existing data does not permit a finding that the City of Detroit is experiencing a public health emergency caused by water shutoffs.”
Health experts immediately scoffed at the idea that water shutoffs do not create the conditions for a public health emergency even absent the coronavirus. In response to Whitmer, pediatrician Mona Hanna-Attisha, M.D., whose research into rising lead levels in children helped uncover the Flint water crisis, stated: “It’s a bit ridiculous to even have such a conversation. Water is a medical and public health necessity. The fact that we have to wait to see the deleterious outcomes is backwards and anti-prevention and anti-common sense and anti-science.”
What a hypocrisy it was to see Whitmer then appearing on television and radio just one week later, stating that hand washing (which requires water) was critical for public health in light of the COVID-19 crisis! She didn’t issue a moratorium on water shutoffs until March 10.
Activists challenge illegal shutoffs
The ACLU and other attorneys and parties filed a lawsuit on July 9, in federal court in Detroit calling to halt water shutoffs after their petition was rejected by the State of Michigan and City of Detroit. While these entities and DWSD were making public pronouncements declaring a moratorium on shutoffs through 2022, they also filed motions to dismiss the case and defend their shutoff policy.
The lawsuit notes that between 2014 and 2019, more than 141,000 households in Detroit had their water service disconnected for non-payment. In 2014, Detroit disconnected water service to approximately 44,000 households for non-payment of bills. In 2018, the city disconnected water service for more than 16,000 households. In 2019, shutoffs rose again to a total of 23,473.
Some families live for years without water service in their homes after a disconnection by DWSD. Others are trapped in a cycle of water insecurity with repeated disconnections and reconnections. These water insecure families risk losing service at any time because of their inability to pay DWSD’s rates.
Paying 10 percent of income for water
The lawsuit cites Environmental Protection Agency reports that indicate affordable rates for water service should total no more than 2 to 2.5 percent of household income. In contrast, Detroiters often pay 10 percent of their incomes for their water bills and some pay even more.
The City of Detroit and DWSD have rejected proposals for water affordability plans regularly presented to them since 2005, despite expert testimony stating that such a plan would prevent shutoffs and even increase payment collections.
In addition, the lawsuit brings a race discrimination claim noting that from January 2017 to July 2018, 95 percent of residential water shutoffs occurred in Census tracts with a population greater than 50 percent African American. (Case No. 20-11860, U.S. District Court, Eastern District Michigan.)
Lawsuit describes horror of shutoffs
The stories of the named plaintiffs in the class-action lawsuit typify the horror faced by Detroiters when their water is shut off.
Jacqueline Taylor is a 66-year-old African American resident of Detroit. Her monthly income from Social Security disability is $860 per month. For two months, in January and February 2016, no one was living in her home while she was in a rehabilitation center recuperating from a hip replacement. She received a water bill of $1,500 for those two months, which the DWSD refused to adjust.
As a result, Taylor’s water was eventually shut off, and she lived without water from mid-2018 to March 2020, when the emergency order to reconnect service due to COVID-19 took effect. Her unpaid bill, subject to disconnection in the future, is over $6,000.
Lois Brooks, 55, is an African American resident of Detroit with two teen-aged children. Her monthly income is $1,200 from Social Security along with food stamps. She is on oxygen due to pulmonary disease, and her son is asthmatic and requires a nebulizer that uses water. Her water was disconnected in 2018 and she and her family lived without water for about a year, when her water was reconnected subject to paying $200 per month, or 17 percent of her income.
When Brooks couldn’t keep up, her water was disconnected again and was only reconnected in March 2020 under the COVID-19 order. She owes $2,000 in arrearages and is subject to disconnection when the moratorium is lifted.
Michele Cowan, a 42-year-old African American resident of Detroit, lives with two of her adult daughters and two grandchildren, ages 2 and 6. Her family’s income is $1,300 per month. Her water was disconnected in August 2019 for approximately $700 in arrearages, and was only reconnected in March 2020 after the COVID-19 emergency.
Tuana Henry, age 45, is an African American woman with eight children living with her, six of whom are under 18. Her income averages between $1,200 and $1,800 per month. She suffers from asthma and bronchitis. Her water was shut off in May 2019 and only reconnected in March 2020 after the COVID-19 emergency was declared.
Mattie McCorkle is a 41-year-old African American Detroiter who lives with her husband and their three children. She and her spouse have a joint annual income of approximately $22,000. Her water service was cut off in 2016, reconnected after she enrolled in the WRAP program, then disconnected again in 2018 when she was unable to keep up her payments. It was not turned on again until April or May 2020.
Renee Wilson, 49, is an African American Detroit resident who lives with her son and minor grandchild. Her monthly income is $659 in disability payments. Her water service was disconnected, reinstated in 2017 under the WRAP plan, then shut off again in May 2019 when she couldn’t make the $200 per month water payment. On April 14, DWSD sent her a bill for over $3,000. She was never advised of DWSD being under an executive order to restore service, and only had her service restored in May 2020, when the Brightmoor Food Pantry paid her full arrearage.
Water shutoffs and the banks
During the Detroit municipal bankruptcy of 2013 to 2014, the Great Lakes Water Authority was created to take over DWSD operations (DWSD still manages service to Detroiters) as a step toward privatizing the city’s water system.
The GLWA took over DWSD’s bond debt of approximately $5 billion, which included $537 million in termination fees based on crooked interest rate swaps owed to Chase, Citi, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, UBS, and so on. The condition set by the bondholders for GLWA taking over the debt was that the DWSD institute mass water shutoffs to force overburdened Detroiters to pay more for their service.
Mass shutoffs ensued. There were 44,000 water shutoffs in 2014, and 97,000 more in the five years that followed.
When the shutoffs began, there was a big people’s movement with mass marches challenging the shutoffs led by community organizations with support from the National Nurses Association. The Michigan Welfare Rights Organization was instrumental in bringing to Detroit Catherina de Albuquerque, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation, and Leilani Farhi, UN Special Rapporteur on the human right to adequate housing.
UN official: Water cutoffs ‘violate human rights’
Albuquerque declared that water shutoffs in Detroit are a violation of the human right to safe water as embodied in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. However, because the United States never became a signatory to the declaration, she had no power to enforce the human rights violations she observed.
Albuquerque said she has traveled all over the world and could understand inadequate water in a developing country that did not have the infrastructure to supply its people. But for Detroit families to be subjected to shutoffs and deprived of safe drinking water in the richest county in the world, in a state surrounded by fresh water, was a retrograde crisis, a sign of society moving backwards as a result of capitalism and corporate greed.
The water shutoff crisis was introduced by a Detroit resident and homeowner who raised the issue of the shutoffs so powerfully that Judge Steven Rhodes ordered DWSD officials to immediately appear in court and explain them. A complaint for an injunction on the shutoffs was immediately filed.
What ensued was an amazing trial on the human right to water, held in federal bankruptcy court, featuring testimony from victims of water shutoffs and their advocates. After several days, Judge Rhodes issued his ruling. He conceded that DWSD had no plan in effect to ameliorate the effect of water shutoffs on poor Detroiters and especially on seniors.
Court values bondholders over human right to water
However, in a decision that sums up capitalism to a tee, Rhodes ruled that the harm to bondholders if they were not paid their debt service in a timely manner was a greater harm, and he denied the injunction to stop the shutoffs.
Maude Barlow, a human rights and water rights activist, co-authored an article in 2004 pointing out how the World Bank was the motor force behind the privatization of water worldwide. With two billion people now living in nations plagued by water problems, and almost two-thirds of the world facing water shortages, bets on future water supplies are now being traded by the capitalists as commodities on Wall Street.
The absurdity of capitalism creates a different problem in Michigan, where fresh water is prevalent. Here the greed of the capitalists, and finance capital in particular, ensures that thousands are denied water despite a plentiful supply.
In a socialist society, water will be a human right, and the term “water shutoff for non-payment” will be eliminated from the vocabulary and relegated to the dustbin of history where it belongs.
