Melissa Harris-Perry: It's The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. In early September, a water crisis in Jackson, Mississippi, made national headlines.

Reporter: Residents of Jackson, Mississippi, have gone without safe drinking water for weeks after heavy rainfall caused a failure at the city's largest water treatment plant.

Melissa Harris-Perry: On November 23rd, Mississippi Governor, Tate Reeves, ended the state of emergency that had been in effect since the end of August. Until recently, residents in various parts of the city were still instructed to boil their water, but as of Thursday morning, the city is no longer under a boil water notice.

Now, last week, the US Department of Justice filed a civil suit on behalf of the EPA against the city of Jackson for failing to comply with the Safe Drinking Water Act. Jackson and the Mississippi Health Department agreed to federal oversight of the water system, but a recent AP report found that safe access to drinking water is a much wider issue affecting smaller and more rural communities across the US.

According to the AP, small water providers are roughly twice as likely to violate the health standards of the Safe Drinking Water Act than those in larger cities. One of those small communities is the town of Keystone, West Virginia. The town first went on a boil water advisory in 2010 and has struggled with their local water system for over a decade.

[phone ringing]

Mayor Holly Maben: Good afternoon, this is Holly.

Melissa Harris-Perry: To hear more about it, we called City Hall in Keystone, West Virginia.

Mayor Holly Maben: My name is Holly Maben, and I'm the acting mayor, recorder, clerk, treasurer, bottle washer, pretty much everything. We're a very small town.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Now, just to give you a sense of just how small the town is, Mayor Maben won her election earlier this year with 24 votes total, and the total population of Keystone is less than 200 residents. Although Mayor Maben is new to office, she's been working with McDowell County to make keystone a tourist attraction for the holidays.

Mayor Holly Maben: We want to try to make it a Christmas town, so we're going to work on that next year. Right now, we'll just be happy we can get some decorations. We found some old ones that we cleaned up, polished up to put out for this year, but that's our goal for next year, to make it an annual event for Keystone to be the Christmas town, and we'll try to get a skate rink together and do that.

Melissa Harris-Perry: For years, the town dealt with their local water system either breaking down or being contaminated until residents were finally connected to a new water system last December, but before that--

Mayor Holly Maben: The pump store kept breaking, and just got polluted, and it would always go down, and so the town would always be without water, or it would just stop running, or be contaminated, things like that. We would have to go by, my sister and I and some other people, the community, and we took trucks and took cases of water to all different homes, and that was done several times during the years that we would have to deliver water for everybody.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Mayor Maben was born and raised in Keystone, and these water issues affected everything, drinking, cooking, washing dishes, even bathing. It's gone on for so long, it just became part of daily life.

Mayor Holly Maben: It's complicated, but you adjust because it's what you have to do until it's taken care of. It's just a matter of having that water, whether you buy by the gallon or you buy by the drinking container, and it takes three or four bottles of drinking water to fill up a tea kettle. Same thing with cooking. You just adjust. Is almost instead of turning on a sprout, you use the bottle. It's like you get accustomed till you adjust.

Probably the most difficult thing, of course, is bathing instead of shower, because you couldn't possibly shower, but you would have to fill your tubs to bathe. I like to use the term, and this is me personally, and I don't even remember where I got it from, probably back in the day they would call it the bur bath.

That's where you are using shallow water to actually bathe yourself. I'm thinking it's what everybody had to do, something to adjust to that kind of thing. You do what you got to do, and that's what we did. In time things got better and now we're under a better system, so keep hope alive, everything will work well with this new company.

Melissa Harris-Perry: A year in, Mayor Maben says the new water system is holding up, but out of habit, she still uses bottled water for drinking.

Mayor Holly Maben: We still keep water just in case, so the city hall always has water in case somebody needs it. We really appreciated everyone who helped us out and got us through it and all the way over it.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Our thanks to Mayor Holly Maben for sharing your story about Keystone, West Virginia. Up next, we're going to talk about the policy side of why small water systems are more likely to fail.

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Melissa Harris-Perry: You're back with The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. We've been talking about access to safe drinking water. A recent AP report found that small and rural communities across the US are more vulnerable to issues with their water systems and may have less access to clean water to drink, wash dishes, or bathe. To learn more about the issues with these water systems in small communities, we turn to an expert in public policy and water.

Manny Teodoro: My name is Manny Teodoro. I'm associate professor of Public Affairs at the La Follette School at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Melissa Harris-Perry: He's also the author of the new book, The Profits of Distrust: Citizen-Consumers, Drinking Water, and the Crisis of Confidence in American Government.

Manny Teodoro: It's, I think, useful to start with just the sheer dizzying number of water systems in this country. There are about 50,000 community water systems in the United States. That's an order of magnitude larger than the total of the entire energy sector, electricity and gas put together. It's enormously fragmented, and that's because our water systems popped up and grew as our communities grew.

As our communities grew, the small communities tended to have their own water systems, and it grew naturally that way. Today, of those 50,000 water systems, roughly 90% of those systems serve populations of less than 10,000. About 80% of the systems serve populations under 3,300, so the majority of those systems are really, really small.

They started small, they've stayed small because when they started-- and for a long time, drinking water was a pretty low-tech business. You put a well in the ground, you attach to pump, you pumped water into pipes, and it went into people's homes, and that was about it. Maybe you added a little bit of chlorine to help with disinfection, but there wasn't much more to it than that.

Today, drinking water is a much more technically complex field. We demand higher quality water for good reason, but that requires higher levels of treatment technology. It requires evermore vigilant and evermore complex tasks, and a lot of these small systems mainly lack the human capital, lack the organizational capacity to run these water systems. When you've got new contaminants, when you've got shrinking populations in some of these rural communities, it's just a recipe for falling behind.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Talk to me a little bit more about the money. Part of what's happening here presumably, if it's a small system that is serving only a small town community, even if you were taxing everybody at the highest rate, there just wouldn't be enough tax revenue. Is that part of it that we expect local communities to actually be able to supply the revenue sufficient for this?

Manny Teodoro: Yes, that certainly is part of the problem. Look, it ties back to the fragmentation we talked about a few minutes ago. When you've got a larger system, by larger I mean just simply larger numbers of people, more customers, more homes, more businesses, that makes you also more financially resilient.

On any given day, we might need an investment in one part of our water system, but not another. Well, it's kind of like an insurance plan. When you've got a large insurance pool, you're going to have a mix of healthy people, and sick people, and everything in between, and the larger insurance pool helps balance out those costs and equalize them.

When you're talking about a small town, they're very vulnerable to financial fluctuations, and, again, those are the places where we see the most dire problems. It's these smaller communities with lower income populations, often racial and ethnic minority populations as well.

Melissa Harris-Perry: What about a place like Keystone, West Virginia? They've been on a boil water notice for a decade. Where is the regulation?

Manny Teodoro: It's astonishing, isn't it? I want to be careful here because I do not know the details of the Keystone case in particular. What I can say is this, the regulatory framework that we used to manage water quality in the United States is very poorly suited to addressing failing local government water systems. That becomes clear when you start thinking about the incentives and the constraints that face people.

If you're a regulator, an environmental regulator, let's say West Virginia, when you face a problem that's perennially-- a utility that's perennially failing like Keystone, you don't have a lot of good choices. The levers that we normally use in environmental regulation, like fines, forfeitures, closing down stripping of licensure for operations, those work fine when you're talking about a factory or a gas station or a car dealership. They don't work so well when you're talking about a community water system.

Unless I have some way to channel large resources to that town, I don't have a lot of good choices. My incentives are mainly to look the other way or move the goalposts, wag my finger and say, "Hey, y'all should do better," but in the end, I don't have a lot of good choices for compelling compliance.

Melissa Harris-Perry: With so few good options and a pretty serious principal agent problem here, are there solutions? What are some of the ways we can move to ensuring that all communities, particularly those that are small and under-resourced, have access regularly to clean drinking water?

Manny Teodoro: The clear solution or a clear solution that has to be part of any discussion is consolidation. It is absurd that today in the early 21st century, we have 50,000 community water systems operated by tens of thousands of organizations. We need massive sweeping consolidation. My own analysis suggests that we would see market improvements across the country if we could get that number down by an order of magnitude to something like 5,000 to 7,000 systems.

Consolidation is not a cure-all. It's not going to solve all of our problems, but nothing else we do will really matter until we get consolidation, till we make those small systems part of larger organizations. That doesn't mean necessarily physically tying different utilities to one another, it means putting them under single organizations.

You could have lots and lots of small systems that are all operated by a single organization. In fact, we see that model in a lot of parts of the country. We need much, much more.

Along with that, we need regulatory reform. Those things that I was talking about a moment ago, where we've got bad incentives in front of regulators. We need to give regulators incentives to crack down and to take seriously and really enforce these laws.

Melissa Harris-Perry: Manny Teodoro is a professor at the University of Wisconsin. He focuses on public policy and water, and is co-author of The Profits of Distrust. Manny, again, thank you so much for being with us.

Manny Teodoro: It's been my pleasure, Melissa. Thanks.

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