Wastewater treatment facility along the Chesapeake Bay

By Shannon Curley

Every Pennsylvanian who stepped into the voting booth yesterday knew they were about to vote for either Barack Obama or John McCain for president. What they might not have known, though, is that they were going to be asked a 400 million dollar question.

On the ballot in Pennsylvania yesterday was an issue that many voters were confronted with for the first time: whether or not Pennsylvania should incur 400 million dollars worth of debt to improve the state’s water and sewer infrastructure. The referendum question on the ballot was:

Do you favor the incurring of indebtedness by the Commonwealth of $400,000,000 for grants and loans to municipalities and public utilities for the cost of all labor, materials, necessary operational machinery and equipment, lands, property, rights and easements, plans and specifications, surveys, estimates of costs and revenues, prefeasibility studies, engineering and legal services and all other expenses necessary or incident to the acquisition, construction, improvement, expansion, extension, repair or rehabilitation of all or part of drinking water system, storm water, nonpoint source projects, nutrient credits and wastewater treatment system projects?

In a press release sent out by the Rendell administration October 27, Governor Ed Rendell acknowledged that the question “sounds complex,” but insisted that it really just meant, “Will you support a $400 million investment to clean up Pennsylvania’s waterways and provide safer, more dependable drinking water and sewer services?”

According to the Pennsylvania Environmental Council, one of the organizations that supported the initiative, many of Pennsylvania’s drinking and wastewater systems are so old and out of date that they do not meet federal and state requirements that are meant to ensure clean drinking water and to clean up pollution.

All this cleaning up, though, is going to cost way more than the 400 million that Pennsylvania voters approved yesterday. All told, the state will spend over a billion dollars on this. Last July, Governor Rendell signed two bills, Act 63 and Act 64. The two acts together called for spending $1.2 billion for things including water and wastewater facilities as well as flood control measures and repairs for unsafe dams.

Act 63 introduced by Jane Earll (R- Erie) allocated at least $750 million from the revenues generated by the slots and did not require voter approval.

­Act 64 by Raphael Musto (D- Luzerne) required voter approval to borrow $400 million.

Both bills provided that the Pennsylvania Infrastructure Investment Authority, or PENNVEST, a state agency, would disperse the money.

Yesterday, Pennsylvania voters approved the referendum 61%-38%.

Shannon Curley is an It’s Our City intern and a senior at La Salle University in Philadelphia. She was an intern for Governor Rendell’s Office of Legislative Affairs in Summer 2007 and Summer 2008.