The Broken Promise of the City Water System
Aberdeen’s municipal water works are failing, and the city’s struggle to move residents away from private systems reveals a tangle of missing infrastructure and unfair billing.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
An investigation of the water system shows a sad lack of push on the part of the city, and a queer state of affairs. Scarcely half the people of the city use the city water. Not a soul uses it in the East side. The Benn system continues to supply a large portion of the residents, and the Weatherwax system supplies the people in the western end of the city, leaving practically but the center of the city to pay for the maintenance of the water works. This is all wrong, and unless something is done to increase the revenue from the water rents the water works will prove a white elephant of mammoth proportions. Some time ago the old council ordered the Benn water system to be cut off at Market street, but it never was done, and about fifteen families get their water for nothing. Objection is made to taking city water because the rates are established on a basis of the number of rooms in a house instead of number of persons, which in many cases makes the rates beyond the means of small families living in large houses.
“Unless something is done to increase the revenue from the water rents the water works will prove a white elephant of mammoth proportions.”
Aberdeen’s struggle to manage utility infrastructure in the 1890s highlights the perennial tension between municipal expansion and the economic realities of its residents. Today, the debate over utility rates and the difficulty of providing equitable infrastructure to a growing city remain core challenges for civic planners.
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