The Detroit Water and Sewerage Department continues to leak customers, threatening the rest of the sprawling system with rising rates and an uncertain future.
“The dominoes are falling, one by one. The real problem is that half of the people in the city of Detroit aren’t paying their bills, and that’s forcing rates up for everybody else,” Dennis Green, retired head water systems engineer for the department, tells Bill Laitner of the Free Press.
Laitner reports that with negotiations stalled between Detroit’s bankruptcy lawyers and suburban communities over financing the region’s future water and sewer service, Grosse Pointe Park has quietly devised a plan to quit buying water from Detroit.
Instead, the affluent city of about 12,000 residents hopes to build its own $15-million water filtration plant at a park along Lake St. Clair at the head of the Detroit River.
Grosse Pointe Park officials said they would implement the plan only if Detroit hikes rates as part of the city’s bankruptcy settlement. And on Monday, they renewed the city’s sewerage contract with Detroit.
But seeing the prominent suburb quit buying water from Detroit likely would add to the momentum of suburban communities choosing to break away from Detroit’s massive but troubled regional system. And that would further drive up rates for remaining water customers, said a former engineering director with the Detroit system
