What Should My City Do About Our Infrastructure Backlog?

In 1997, my Samoyed dog, Sebaka, and I spent a long overnight up in the city of Longville, Minnesota, pulling manhole covers in an attempt to determine where all the sewage was coming from. The city’s wastewater treatment facility was nearing capacity, something that should not have happened based on their population (less than 300, at the time), and I was the one chosen to solve the mystery. It was not glamorous work.

It also wasn’t much of a mystery. Longville was surrounded by lakes and pretty much all of the city was built on filled in wetlands. The water table—the level below which the ground is saturated with water—was very high. As happens, the roughly 30-year-old sewer system had settled and shifted and now the once-tight joints in the pipes, which were all under the water table, were leaking.

The hope was that this would be an acute problem, something confined to one or two lengths of pipe. That wasn’t the case, however. Like an aging arthritic, the joints were shot throughout. The system was leaking a little bit everywhere, something called “infiltration” in the business. To fix the problem would cost over $2 million, a project that began four years later when I was in graduate school.

That’s $2 million for a city of 300 people. Google suggests that population has now been cut in half. One component of an infrastructure system, in one very small town, with a common and predictable problem. Over $2 million over two decades ago.

A Big Hole to Dig Out Of

I consider my home state of Minnesota to be pretty well run, especially if we’re grading on a curve. Our public pensions are a disaster, for example, and the projections we use are as delusional as anyone’s, but we’re 75% funded, a long ways from Illinois, New Jersey, or California.

Last week, as part of a theatrical rollout of major borrowing proposals, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz announced from 90-feet down in a stormwater drain that he is seeking approval from the legislature for $300 million in debt for infrastructure investments. I didn’t vote for the governor, but he seems like a decent, pragmatic guy. He is certainly expressing what I believe are commonly held beliefs among those in public leadership today.

Walz said he tries to relate the need to typical home repairs. No one likes to fix their roof or replace their windows, but eventually it has to be done, he said.

“Those are investments that bring value back into your house. Same thing with the state: If we don’t keep our infrastructure up, it reduces our capacity,” Walz said.

In that article, there is a long list of what the money is going to go for. I found this line item particularly noteworthy:

$5 million for public infrastructure improvements to reduce inflow and infiltration into local and regional wastewater collection systems.

(Note: I originally suggested this program was the one my Longville project would have tapped. received an update that the $5 million is for a new program targeting private sewer laterals — the privately-owned pipe between the home and the public’s pipe — and not funding of public infrastructure. I appreciate the clarification.) Two decades from their last project, they are getting near the point in time when their last system started to show its age.

The Star Tribune article also reports two line-items in the governor’s request specifically for water infrastructure: $25 million for water infrastructure grants and to increase lending capacity in the Clean Water and Drinking Water Revolving Funds and $100 million for the Water Infrastructure Funding Program, which provides supplemental assistance grants to help communities build clean water and drinking water infrastructure projects.

My local newspaper gave that $125 million some much-needed context:

Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Commissioner Laura Bishop said at Friday's news conference that local governments across Minnesota have requested state funding to complete 983 water infrastructure projects, totaling more than $4 billion in the next 20 years.

Assuming no new projects added to the backlog, and assuming the governor gets all the money he wants for the next biennium, and we repeat this amount every biennium, it will take Minnesota 64 years to get through the backlog.

None of those assumptions are remotely likely to be true.

Can we stop digging now?

Last week I was in Shreveport, Louisiana, where city officials were recently informed of a $1 billion pending expense for wastewater infrastructure investments, up from an initial estimate of $350 million. Grading on the same curve that would make Minnesota a well-run state, Louisiana would reside near the opposite end of the spectrum. For Shreveport, there is little to no help coming from the state. It’s not clear what they are going to do.

Memphis has informed its suburbs that it can’t continue to subsidize their wastewater system once a 40-year agreement to provide service expires. Those suburbs have not only refused rate increases, but have now filed a lawsuit against Memphis, demanding that the (relatively poor) citizens of Memphis continue to subsidize the (relatively affluent) suburban residents. Memphis does not have the money to service and maintain even its own system, let alone extend subsidized services beyond its boundaries. Again, this is another situation where it’s not at all clear how this can be resolved without someone ending up like a Detroit neighborhood: lots of promises with no means to keep them.

And for the record, Memphis should be applauded for their leadership. They are one of the few cities in the United States that has taken steps to acknowledge and then start to deal with the problem. This is a far cry from Shreveport, as evidenced by this quote from the article cited above:

When asked how it would be possible to not raise rates to help finance the project, [Shreveport City Council Chairman Jerry] Bowman replied, “We concluded not to put any more increases on rate payers and we intend to keep it that way.''

Memphis has ceased annexing new properties into the city and has stopped expanding its utilities, focusing on maintaining—and improving the productivity of—their current infrastructure investments. Shreveport is aggressively digging its financial hole deeper by doing both in an old-school strategy belief that just a little more growth will improve the situation. It won’t.

What is a local government to do?

These are complex problems that defy simple responses. In fact, as we’ve said here many times, it is the reduction of our development approach down to simple responses that has suppressed the helpful feedback that would have kept things from getting this bad.

Still, there are three very simple – yet profound – steps that all cities facing huge backlogs in infrastructure maintenance should immediately embark on.

1. Stop adding more infrastructure. When you have a leaking roof, you don’t put an addition on your house. When your car engine is sputtering, you don’t upgrade the speaker system. This is an easy and obvious policy to enact; the only thing preventing it is the momentum of the current approach.

2. Stop bringing more acreage into the city limits. Again, how can we make promises to new property owners when we can’t keep the ones we have made to our current residents? And as Memphis has realized, how can we increase the tax burden on our own residents to support developers and others outside the city limits? We can’t and we shouldn’t.

3. Shift focus from expansion to getting more out of existing investments. Any community that wants to improve its fiscal health needs to obsessively focus on getting a higher return on its existing infrastructure investments. That is a complex balancing act of physical investment, financial analysis, and cultural dialogue. All three are critical, but this is where the work needs to occur, not the (comparatively easy, yet destructive) expansion model.

These three steps are simple, yet they seem scary. They shouldn’t be. Yes, there will be a backlash from parts of the development community currently enjoying the hidden subsidies inherent in the current development approach. And, yes, there will be those who reflexively call these changes “anti-growth” even though they are nothing of the sort.

Yet, if communicated with an emphasis on the welfare and success of the community as a whole, these changes will have broad public support. Nobody wants their taxes to go up to subsidize growth that will ultimately make the community poorer.

For cities wanting to grow stronger, rhetorically lean into your next infrastructure backlog report instead of running away from it. That’s leadership, and it will be rewarded.

Top photo of Minnesota Governor Tim Walz by Lorie Shaull.

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