To David Rager, director of the Cincinnati Water Works, expanding across the Ohio represents not just a new piece of infrastructure but also a key victory for regionalism. A career civil servant who has held a wide variety of city jobs, including assistant city manager, the 45-year-old Rager has long been pushing for a regional approach. He has aggressively marketed his city's water to suburban communities, both in Ohio and across the state border. With several agreements now in hand, Rager has in fact become something of a regional water czar. "Cincinnati Water Works is by far the major water utility in the region," Rager says. "We're here to help the community grow. And if our neighbors grow, then we grow, because Cincinnati's business is dependent on their business."
Rager also has financial reasons to expand Cincinnati Water Works outward. With people and industries having left the city in recent years, and household faucets becoming more efficient, water consumption in Cincinnati has dropped. If Rager wants to keep his rates down, he has to find more people to buy the product. And Cincinnati has quite a lot to sell. The water works is currently pumping about 130 million gallons of water daily, but it has the capacity to pump twice that.
To bursting jurisdictions such as Boone County, Rager's pitch is an easy sell. Boone had considered meeting new demand for water by building an expensive new treatment plant. Buying from Cincinnati instead will save the county $50 million in the long run--even with the cost of tunneling under the river. In addition, Cincinnati's water is known for its high quality, thanks to a state-of-the-art carbon- filtration system at its main treatment plant.
Some critics argue that by selling cheaper water in the suburbs, Rager is essentially subsidizing sprawl. Places such as Boone County, they say, are not paying the full price of their own rapid development, and this flies in the face of the kind of regional planning they would like to see. "This is one more example of uncoordinated decision making about the region's infrastructure," says Glen Brand, an organizer with the Sierra Club in Cincinnati. "The decision to sell cheap water out there is helping these areas to continue growing in an irresponsible fashion."
Rager shrugs off the criticism, saying that water availability does not drive development in the Cincinnati area the way it does in other places. He says that expanding the water works out into the suburbs has had not only financial benefits but public health benefits as well.
In neighboring Butler County, Ohio, he points out, children in the Venice Gardens subdivision have been getting sick from drinking well water for years. The tightly packed community's 300 homes all have septic tanks, and water from the polluted aquifer below them can sometimes taste and smell like sewage. After years of fighting to get their own county to install water lines, residents approached Rager, who offered matching funds to get a grant for the project. The residents became Cincinnati Water Works customers last August, and they talk about their clean water as though it were a gift from the gods. "You couldn't bathe a baby in the water we had here," says Jeane Wagonfield, a Venice Gardens resident for 29 years. "We would never have gotten clean water here if Dave Rager hadn't fought for us."
