Wisconsin's Overpass Light Brigade illuminates the water privatization issue at the state Capitol. (OLB photos)aA

The Children's Museum in Indianapolis boasts North America's biggest water clock, a tower that uses colored water to mark the passage of time. While a remarkable and elegant device, It's also an ironic, inadvertent metaphor for that city’s decision more than a decade ago to transfer its public water utility to private ownership, a move the city later rescinded after poor service and high rates.

The Indy experience was an early skirmish in an accelerating push by companies like Veolia, the French transnational, to either service or own more and more public water resources in the USA.

According to today’​s Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, another company with similar intentions is Aqua America Inc. That's a Pennsylvania firm with operations in Illinois and seven other states, "whose aggressive growth strategy has resulted in nearly 200 acquisitions in the last decade." The newspaper reported that the firm now is eyeing water-rich Wisconsin — a state bordered by two Great Lakes, the Mississippi River and 15,000 inland lakes. It’s a potentially rich prize, where nearly all water and sewer systems are owned and operated by municipalities. www.jsonline.com/...

And how is Aqua America pursuing its ambition in the Badger state? Why, through the tried and true method of plying state legislators into loosening state law, making it much easier for governments to approve -- and harder for citizens to oppose -- privatizing fresh water resources and institutions. As Bruce Murphy at the Urban Milwaukee news site noted, Aqua America simply registered as a lobbyist, then hired former Wisconsin Republican legislator and Assembly majority leader Steven Foti as its lobbyist. Quick, everyone rub shoulders. urbanmilwaukee.com/...

On cue, Republican floor leaders launched a measure addressing Aqua America's desires. They rammed state Assembly Bill 554 through in a voice vote before most citizens, public interest groups and local governments knew what was going on. Opposition since then has been fierce, both from environmental and municipal groups who are now focusing on a companion measure pending in the state Senate, which like the Assembly is GOP-controlled and hair-trigger.

The worst part of this generally bad bill is that it would change current state law, hampering the use of citizen referendums to approve or reject a deal. For citizens to get involved in the decision, they'd have to meet towering requirements to collect petitions. In a city the size of Milwaukee, that would require organizers to gather tens of thousands of signatures in short order. Any formal citizen input would come before the plan had been fully reviewed by the state Public Service Commission (PSC), which is currently controlled by Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

Clearly this is not a serious attempt to balance competing public and private interests. From the Journal Sentinel story:

Under current law, before a utility is sold, the municipality must adopt an ordinance or resolution that approves the sale. Then it goes to the PSC for approval, and then voters have their say in a referendum. The bill would make referendums optional. Citizens would have 60 days to get the signatures of 10% of the voters in the municipality to force a referendum.

The Overpass Light Brigade, a Milwaukee-based activist group famous for lighting up highway overpasses with protest signs, had this comment on its web site regarding the GOP's fast-track legislation: overpasslightbrigade.org

It is no surprise that the State Legislature is keeping this so quiet, with the toxic poisoning of Flint in the news. According to State Senator Chris Larson, who is on the Senate Committee that reviews SB432, there was “minimal testimony against these bills during the public hearing, with most of the opposition concerned not with the idea of allowing our waters to be sold to us for profit, but rather on the referendum changes that make it harder for the public to refuse a sale.”

In short, this is another race to poor judgment — and another Wisconsin Republican assault on local control. And, just as in the mining deregulation bill that raced through the same legislature after Gogebic Taconite dropped $700,000 into dark-money coffers supporting Gov. Walker, this bill is in service to the urgings of precisely one company.

We don't know yet how many if any campaign contributions Aqua America has sent down its government pipeline. Given recent Wisconsin GOP moves to hide such contributions in even darker places, we might never know. www.jsonline.com/...

What could come of all this? Citizens and policymakers can look to Atlanta, which privatized its water works and then pulled out of the deal after a few years because, as in Indianapolis, privatization led to poor quality service and high rates. Another example is Flint, Michigan, current poster child for unintended consequences when local control over a vital public resource is lost.

Figuring in the Flint case is the Detroit public water utility, which has been the target of takeover talk for years. It serves a huge region of suburbs, which have resisted rate increases. Given the city's declining population, the water utility has accumulated a large debt. It's silly to imagine that a for-profit company could take over the system and offer the same or better service at the same rates or less. It’s just plain nonsensical to push toward more privatization, when it was the failure of private industry that caused troubles in places like Detroit and Flint.

According to the Overpass Brigade, Veolia is particularly interested in Milwaukee, which has been aggressive in recent years branding itself as a "water city," creating new university curricula, research circles and business parks for locally based water quality firms. The city’s current political leaders nevertheless disdain the idea of privatizing the city water utility after studying the matter carefully some years ago. Regarding the “water city,” the Brigade added: