By Jason Mumm
The numbers that guide affordability policies in the water sector have been with us for decades. They are 2 percent of the median household income for wastewater, 2.5 percent for drinking water, and 4.5 percent combined; most practitioners have treated them as settled values.
A recent disclosure by the EPA suggests a problem the industry has not confronted: the data underlying those thresholds were collected during an era of robust federal grantmaking, and the thresholds almost certainly reflect that.
What Footnote 12 Tells Us
What Footnote 12 Tells Us For years, the 2 percent MHI wastewater threshold operated as what has been called a “golden number,” something invoked by convention with no disclosed rationale.
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