Why Small Communities Need More Flexible Water Infrastructure
New approaches can help small towns manage aging systems, growth, and limited budgets
Keeping water and wastewater systems in good shape can be especially difficult for a small town. They still have aging pipes and equipment to replace, treatment plants that run out of capacity, new development to serve, and state and federal requirements to meet. What they often don’t have is the budget or staff of a larger utility.
That can make even a fairly straightforward infrastructure project difficult to pull off. Say a town’s wastewater plant is getting close to capacity. Building a much larger plant now might solve the problem for decades, but it also means paying for capacity that could sit unused for years. Waiting until every bit of that capacity is needed isn’t necessarily practical either, especially if the existing plant is already showing its age.
There are more ways to approach that problem than there used to be.
Small Communities Face a Big Infrastructure Bill
The numbers are daunting. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that drinking water systems will need $625 billion over the next 20 years, including about $423 billion for distribution and transmission systems and $107 billion for treatment.
Wastewater isn’t far behind. The EPA’s 2022 Clean Watersheds Needs Survey identified $630.1 billion in clean water infrastructure needs nationwide. That includes $151.1 billion for existing and new wastewater conveyance systems and $74.7 billion associated with decentralized wastewater treatment systems.
Small towns show up frequently in the EPA’s wastewater data. More than 60% of the projects submitted for the survey were from communities with 10,000 residents or fewer. Those projects totaled $47.1 billion in reported needs.
Those towns have fewer customers to spread the cost across. A $10 million project doesn’t become less expensive because a town is small, and raising rates enough to cover a major upgrade may be difficult for the people who live there. That leaves local officials deciding what has to be done now, what can wait, and how much debt the community can reasonably take on.
Building for Future Demand Can Be Expensive
Water and wastewater infrastructure has traditionally been built with future growth in mind. In many cases, that remains the right approach. A community doesn’t want to build a treatment plant only to discover a few years later that it is already too small.
The problem is that growth doesn’t always happen according to plan.
A housing development may take 15 years to build out instead of 10. A new employer can create demand that wasn’t included in earlier projections. Development can shift from one side of town to another. In some communities, expected growth may not happen at all.
Building a large amount of unused capacity upfront can leave today’s ratepayers paying for infrastructure intended to serve tomorrow’s population.
Phased expansion gives communities another way to approach the problem. A plant can be sized around more immediate demand, with additional treatment capacity added as flows increase. This can be especially useful in growing areas where the need for infrastructure is clear, but the timing of that growth is less certain.
Not Everything Has to Flow to One Large Plant
Where treatment occurs can matter just as much as how much capacity is built.
Connecting a new development or an outlying part of town to an existing plant may require miles of new pipe, lift stations, and other supporting infrastructure. In some cases, the cost of getting water or wastewater to and from a centralized plant can become a major part of the project.
A decentralized system provides treatment closer to where the demand exists. Depending on the community, that could mean serving a new residential area, a commercial development, or another part of the service area that is difficult or costly to connect to existing infrastructure.
Decentralized treatment won’t make sense in every situation. Existing infrastructure, density, regulations and long-term development plans all factor into the decision. In places where extending the centralized system would require an expensive network of new pipes and pump stations, treating water or wastewater closer to the new demand may be worth considering.
That doesn’t require abandoning the system the community already has. New capacity can serve one growing area while the existing plant continues serving the rest of the community.
A New Plant Still Needs Someone to Run It
Another challenge can get less attention during the planning process: staffing.
Small utilities may already have trouble recruiting and retaining qualified water and wastewater operators. Building additional infrastructure also means taking on the responsibility of operating and maintaining it for years to come.
That should be part of the cost discussion from the beginning.
A community needs to consider whether existing employees can operate a new system, whether additional staff will be required, and how difficult those positions will be to fill. Maintenance, monitoring and regulatory compliance continue long after construction is complete.
Some communities are addressing those responsibilities through different ownership and operating arrangements. Under service-based models, for example, a private provider may finance, build, operate and maintain the treatment infrastructure while the municipality purchases the resulting water or wastewater service.
Providers of municipal water and wastewater infrastructure solutions can offer several approaches to developing and operating treatment capacity, including arrangements that reduce the amount of capital and day-to-day operational responsibility a municipality takes on itself.
For communities that already have experienced operators and available capital, traditional ownership may still make the most sense. The value of having different models available is that communities can choose based on their own financial and operational circumstances.
Flooding Changes the Calculation
Communities also have to think about conditions that may not have been considered when older infrastructure was built.
Flooding can knock out pumps and electrical equipment, limit access to facilities, and interrupt treatment operations. Hurricanes and other severe storms can cause power outages while water and wastewater systems are under additional stress.
The EPA’s Flood Resilience Guide for Water and Wastewater Utilities provides resources to help small and medium utilities understand flood risks and identify ways to protect critical assets.
For a small community, resilience doesn’t necessarily require replacing an entire plant. It might mean protecting or elevating vulnerable equipment, improving backup power, addressing a particularly vulnerable pump station, or locating new capacity away from an area with known flood risk.
Those improvements can also be phased. Addressing the most pressing vulnerabilities first may be far more realistic than waiting until the community can afford a complete system overhaul.
More Options Can Make Difficult Projects Manageable
Grants, state revolving funds and other public financing programs remain essential for small communities. But securing funding is only one part of planning a water or wastewater project.
Local officials still have to determine how much capacity they need, where it should be located, how quickly it needs to be available, and who will operate it once it is built.
For some communities, the answer will still be a large, municipally owned treatment plant built to accommodate decades of future growth. Others may find that expanding an existing plant in stages makes more sense. In another community, decentralized treatment could solve a capacity problem in one particular growth area without requiring a major expansion of the entire system.
The right answer depends on the community. Giving small towns more ways to finance, build, and operate infrastructure makes it easier to choose a project that fits their current needs without locking them into assumptions about what those needs will look like decades from now.
