Critical Infrastructure Fails The Way It's Funded

Bob Hellman opens this Water Online commentary with a failure that made his argument for him. In December, more than 100,000 residents of Waterbury, Connecticut went six days without running water after a 123-year-old cast-iron pipe finally gave out. For the American Infrastructure Partners CEO, the rupture exposed less about aging metal than about the financing model behind it, a model that quietly tolerates decay until failure makes it impossible to ignore.

He describes decades of what he calls managed deterioration, in which systems are allowed to degrade on the assumption that maintenance can always be postponed. The perverse result, Hellman argues, is that all cost discipline evaporates precisely when an asset crosses from neglect into active failure. Scheduled capital work is shelved, crews are redirected, contractors are hired at premium emergency rates, and supply chains are expedited, turning what could have been planned replacement into far more expensive emergency procurement almost overnight.

The scale, he notes, is national rather than local. The United States and Canada absorb roughly 260,000 water-main breaks a year, one-fifth of all pipe mileage has already outlived its intended lifespan, and the gap between planned funding and documented need runs into the trillions. These conditions, Hellman points out, are cataloged in engineering assessments and bond disclosures year after year, yet officials keep presenting each failure as an unforeseeable one-off. He explains how replacement gets triaged piece by piece, with the segments most visibly at risk moving to the top of capital plans while seemingly stable assets are deferred another budget cycle. As a result, the backlog becomes less a list of projects than a balance sheet of accumulated risk, with each deferral buying near-term fiscal calm at the price of a steeper long-term cost curve.

His proposed remedy is a reliability-first framework. It calls for mandatory asset-management systems that track condition, remaining useful life, and replacement cost across buried infrastructure. Maintenance and replacement funding would be ring-fenced so it cannot be raided to cover other shortfalls, and accountability would be tied to delivered performance, such as systems kept in service and timelines met, rather than to dollars announced. The most effective way to enforce that discipline, Hellman argues, is to bring long-term private investors directly into the capital structure, writing maintenance standards, asset-condition requirements, and timelines into financing agreements that run for decades. Revenue from user fees, dedicated utility charges, or availability payments would be tied to meeting those standards, and if maintenance slips, investors absorb the consequences through penalties, reduced returns, or contract termination. Cities keep ownership and regulatory control while private partners take on responsibility for performance, turning reliability from a discretionary budget line into a contractual obligation.

Hellman is pointed about who bears the cost when that discipline is absent. Waterbury's median household income sits near $49,000 against roughly $84,000 statewide, and more than a fifth of residents live below the poverty line. When service fails, better-off households can buy bottled water or relocate temporarily, but those living closer to the margin cannot, and emergency-driven rate increases or new debt service consume a larger share of their income. He situates Waterbury alongside Jackson, Mississippi, whose water-treatment system collapsed in 2022 under long-documented conditions, and Flint, Michigan, where cost-driven sourcing decisions produced a public-health catastrophe still being paid for years later. The geography changes, he writes, but the fiscal mechanics do not.

He closes with the stakes in hard numbers. National projections suggest that failing to close water-investment gaps could cost as many as 636,000 jobs a year by 2039 and push household water and wastewater failure costs from about $2 billion in 2019 to more than $14 billion by the end of the next decade.