Time to Flush Wastewater Cronyism Down the Drain

At long last, a foul stench has been lifted from Baltimore’s troubled wastewater management system. The city has finally acknowledged that it’s incapable of managing the troubled Back River plant, which processes about 130 million gallons of sewage a day from the Baltimore metropolitan area. The city is slated to hand over control to a private company called Operations Management International (OMI), which will receive $50-100 million over an eight-year period to handle wastewater operations. While Baltimore policymakers were wise to relinquish control to a private company, questions abound over the large award range and no-bid process used to choose the company over other service providers. City officials should come clean over this process and strive for future bid awards to be as competitive as possible. A transparent and privately-run process would be far less smelly than the status-quo.

For all the tax dollars that Baltimoreans pay to their city government, they shouldn’t have to ponder about their post-flush poo. Unfortunately, the city government cannot be trusted to properly treat wastewater. Baltimore’s Back River plant has been a sorry sight for years. In 2015, the Environmental Integrity Project documented that faulty piping at the plant was leading to a “massive sewage backup” that “makes the system more prone to overflow into waterways and basements when it rains.” One downstream consequence is the “flooding [of] the Inner Harbor with human waste.” Back River’s reckless operations resulted in rampant nitrogen discharges into Maryland’s waterways — 29 percent more than permitted by law. City officials approved projects designed to stem the flow of nitrogen and phosphorous into the Chesapeake Bay, but cost overruns totaled in the tens of millions of dollars.

Things went from bad to worse amid personnel changes made over the past few years. In October of 2021, Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott made consultant engineer Yosef Kebede the permanent head of the Department of Public Works’ Bureau of Water and Wastewater, a position that gave the bureaucrat significant control over Back River Plant operations. An investigative report by Baltimore Brew senior editor Mark Reutter revealed that Mr. Kebede embarked on a series of firings and forced dismissals, sidelining senior officials who had more than 130 years combined experience in wastewater management. Mr. Reutter notes, in “their place, Kebede has installed as plant manager, Betty Jacobs, whose career was in safety, not sewage, and a new maintenance manager, Prim Rambissoon, who was an instrumentation technician.” Mr. Kebede’s strange prioritization led to workers focusing on property landscaping when they should have been focused on clearing system clogs. Proposals for relatively inexpensive mechanical fixes stalled in the system’s bureaucracy, and the number of working centrifuges (to process solids) dwindled from two to zero.

It took these abysmal conditions for the state to step in and take control of the plant. It’s now been two years since the Maryland state government took charge and insisted that the city government comply with state pollution permits before handing back control. The slated hand-off to OMI is a tacit admission by the city that, even if it can technically obey environmental laws, it just doesn’t have the wherewithal to manage the plant. Private management is a promising path to improved operations. According to one 2015 study published in the American Journal of Political Science, private power plants and water utilities are 15 to 20 percent less likely to be deemed “high-priority violators” by the Environmental Protection Agency than their government-owned counterparts.

Private operations work best when they have competition that can keep them honest. But, by all indications, this new wastewater management system will have little competition or transparency. The deal with OMI was apparently inked months ago and is only now being reported. And, without competing bids, there’s not much of an incentive for the service provider to do a good job.

Baltimore city certainly has the right idea by handing over wastewater operations to skilled, private expertise. However, the system will not benefit taxpayers and consumers without a robust and transparent bidding process. City officials should flush cronyism down the drain and embrace markets in wastewater management.

David Williams is the president of the Taxpayers Protection Alliance.