Getting Soaked ByThe Free Market

The endless drive to privatize public government services is beginning to hit consumers right in the wallet.  We're told by the corporatists that private companies can provide services and utilities more cheaply and efficiently that evil old government.  Increasingly, that list of privatized services is including basic necessities like water itself.

Ask Texas resident Robert White how that's working out.

When Robert White opened his water bill last month, his jaw dropped: $250 for a month's worth of water and sewer service. The 63-year-old construction contractor, who shares a three-bedroom home with his wife in the bucolic Springbrook Centre subdivision, said he likes to keep his lawn green and expects hefty water bills. "I just don't want to be hijacked," he said.


White's water service is provided by a private utility owned by California-based SouthWest Water Co. LLC. Just across the four-lane Pflugerville Parkway, where White's neighbors in the Springbrook Glen subdivision — a nearly identical grid of neatly arranged brick-faced homes — get their water from Pflugerville, rates are on average about 60 percent less.

And White's bill for water service may nearly double soon, if SouthWest Water gets the latest rate increase it has requested. "I have never felt so helpless," he said. 

So White and other Texans are facing up to $2,000 a year for just for water and sewer service.  No competition, bound to a company who only cares about profiting off water.  And Texas's Utility Commission is designed to make it all but impossible to fight these massive rate increases.  The private water companies say they are simply passing on the true cost of water these days...because states simply don't want to pay to fix aging pipes.  They pass it all over to the private companies and they are making a killing.

Do read the whole story.  Privatized water systems are becoming more and more common...and so are massive rate increases.