Free toilets for Detroiters could mean cleaner water in Great Lakes

Susan Kulczyk couldn’t help it – she hugged her plumber.

“Oh, thank you so much!” Kulczyk exclaimed, after master plumber Adrienne Bennett supervised an assistant who installed an ultra-low-flow toilet for Kulczyk. And such deal — it was free.

“The old one, it moved when you sat on it,” said the chuckling Kulczyk, 60, who lives with her 92-year-old mother in northwest Detroit.

“And you could see water on the floor around it,” she added, moments after giving Bennett a hug.

“You’re welcome, darling. You’re gonna get two of these – one for you, one for mama,” the plumber said.

The new toilets came at no cost to the modest Kulczyk home, along with a free inspection, all aimed at finding ways the low-income mother and daughter could bring down their monthly water bill from the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department. The inspector found some leaks and got them fixed more than a year ago, “but the main thing they said was if I got new toilets, my bill would go down,” Kulczyk said.

She’s part of DWSD’s new program to help low-income Detroiters reduce their water bills, pairing the low-flow toilets with up to $1,000 in plumbing repairs per household to fix leaks. The program – called WRAP, for Water Residential Assistance Program – also helps low-income Detroiters pay their water bills for up to two years.

WRAP is being offered not only in Detroit but across much of Oakland and Macomb counties, and in parts of Wayne County outside of Detroit, although the new toilets are available only in Detroit. What might surprise those who recall the years of acrimony between city and suburb over water rates is that last year about $1.6 million of the suburbs' WRAP money was handed over to Detroit to aid people like Kulczyk. And this spring, the suburbs are considering passing along another $1 million, to be shared by Detroit and Flint.

The reason? Not all suburban-Detroit communities feel their residents need WRAP assistance, particularly in affluent areas like Bloomfield Hills, Grosse Pointe Farms, Novi and Troy, suburban water officials said. Yet, the suburban officials said the cash transfer is fine with them, despite the old bitter battles when DWSD, particularly during the administration of former Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, tried to saddle suburban rate payers with costs that court rulings disallowed because they chiefly benefited Detroiters.

The two-year-old WRAP program was born out of just such regional rancor, during Detroit’s massive bankruptcy, when the city’s water-and-sewer officials were ordered by a judge to join suburban leaders in forming the Great Lakes Water Authority. That meant they were ordered from then on to share decision making and revenue from the system.

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An early initiative was to create WRAP, offering it to any community in Wayne, Oakland and Macomb counties. The money comes from a .5% diversion of revenues coming into the Great Lakes Water Authority, authority officials said. Additional funding in Detroit comes from the nonprofit Wayne Metro Community Service Agency, a nonprofit that blends federal and foundation grants.

Macomb County is thoroughly involved in WRAP, said Brian Baker, chief deputy public works commissioner for Macomb County. Of the county’s 16 “eligible communities” — those that get either water or sewer service from the Great Lake Water Authority — “all but one are participating,” said Baker, who represents Macomb County on the authority’s six-member board. At least 100 people in Sterling Heights, for example, have gotten assistance in paying their water bills, he said.

Still, there is unused WRAP money collected in both Macomb and Oakland counties, particularly in affluent communities where virtually no one needs the assistance, said Robert Daddow, an Oakland County deputy executive. So the authority’s board voted to send that excess to Detroit, said Daddow, who is Oakland’s member on the authority board.

“The biggest user of this money is Detroit, and we have no objection to that,” he said, speaking for Oakland County. This month Baker and Daddow, along with the four other members of the authority, are debating whether to extend WRAP’s bill-paying assistance from two years to three. Daddow said that could mean that some people who need emergency aid could be stuck on a waiting list while others already getting assistance become dependent on it.

WRAP is most broadly applied in Detroit, where there once were tens of thousands of residents who’d fallen behind on their water bills, or who weren’t paying at all, leading to controversial service shut-offs and protests. That era is over, said Gary Brown, director of the Detroit Water & Sewerage Department.

From January 2016, “we’ve raised our collection rate from 77% to 92% now, and we’re shooting for 95%. That’s the national average” of big-city water departments, he said.

WRAP helped make that possible, by aiding Detroiters, but it also benefits all of southeast Michigan including suburbanites, Brown said. Every person who wants cleaner water in the Great Lakes has a stake in Detroit’s new initiatives, he said, because with less water running through the household pipes and toilets of Detroiters into sewers, there is that much less that contributes to sewage overflows contaminating Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River during heavy rainstorms — like those that just pelted southeast Michigan.

During heavy rainstorms, metro-Detroit’s sewage facilities must dump tens of millions of gallons of partially treated sewage into the Detroit River and Lake St. Clair, from overflow points not only in Detroit but also in Oakland and Macomb counties, as well as Downriver and in western Wayne County.

“This isn’t just an altruistic thing we’re doing for poor people. It’s overall a good move for the whole region for us to be installing these low-flow toilets. Whenever we can take water out of the system, there’s that much less water we have to pump and treat with chemicals before we release it to the Great Lakes,” Brown said last week.

The toilet installations began in February, which just coincidentally was the month when Consumer Reports magazine praised the low-flow Niagara toilets being installed in Detroiters’ homes. Old toilets typically send four or even five gallons of water into the region’s sewers with each flush. The new Niagaras need just over a gallon to do the job.

Think the switch from old toilets to new commodes is just a drop in the bucket? Wrong. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, if every old toilet in the nation were replaced with a water-saving model, Americans would flush 520 billion gallons less each year.

For Susan Kulczyk, the results of WRAP’s assistance were easy to track, DWSD spokesman Bryan Peckinpaugh said. Kulczyk’s monthly water bills dropped from well over $200 a month to less than $70 recently, "and we expect them to go down even further as she uses the new toilets," he said.

When Kulczyk watched her new toilet flush for the first time, she couldn’t stop smiling.

“It’s like a toy,” she said.

Contact blaitner@freepress.com