Another flaw in the human character is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”
Kurt Vonnegut
Most of us can name a time when failure to do maintenance cost us. For me, it was the time 30 years ago when, as I drove in a downpour on a two-lane highway, the balding tires that I had delayed replacing hydroplaned.
The car spun, spray blinded the windows, objects inside went flying, and I waited an eternal few seconds for the impact that would send me to the hospital, or worse. As luck would have it, the car stopped with a thud — in the manner of Dorothy’s house in “The Wizard of Oz” — against a clay bank. I was all right and so was the car, except for a smashed taillight.
All the odds said another car should have hit me on that state highway, or that I should have left the road into a ditch and flipped over. I drove off resolved to buy new tires the next day, and I did so.
Neglected maintenance isn’t always that potentially disastrous, but it is always costly. I hesitate even to say almost always costly. The hard reality of life is that when we don’t take care of things, they break. Taking care of things is cheaper.
Waiting to happen
Deep down, almost all of us know this. And yet, when we get to serve on a city council, county board or village board, we easily forget or ignore it.
How often have we seen maintenance get deferred when budget times get tight? It’s a decision that looks good today but will look very bad tomorrow. It’s false economy. Penny wise, pound foolish.
The theme of this month’s Municipal Sewer & Water is cleaning and maintenance strategies. We highlight the City of Raleigh’s steadily expanding preventive maintenance program, which keeps the sewer system in top condition and measurably reduces sanitary sewer overflows. And we describe how the City of Buffalo assigns priorities to make the best possible use of dollars to care for the water distribution system.
There’s a lot to learn from these examples, and yet I suspect that if asked, managers in both communities would say they could do a great deal more if given money for more and better equipment.
The trouble with deferred maintenance on a municipal scale is that it’s not like deferred maintenance on a car, where if you don’t service your cooling system, you’ll wind up some day hunched over a steaming radiator along the freeway. No, the effects are more insidious: more untreated wastewater spilling into the environment, more blockages than usual, more middle-of-the-night main breaks.
Some of these undoubtedly affect customers directly, but absent a basement full of sewage or some other calamity, many may write them off as part of city living.
Making the case
Of course, like facts, the costs of poor maintenance are stubborn things: They don’t go away just because you ignore them. And so, here many water and sewer system managers stand, knowing they need to do more, but are under-equipped and under-funded. And in the meantime, who knows what manner of disaster lurks beneath the streets?
So, what to do? One thing managers like those in Raleigh and Buffalo have in common is the ability to justify maintenance spending. In Raleigh, for example, sewer collections superintendent Hunter Stanley diligently made the case to his council until he won approval for a long-term program of building up his cleaning, inspection and maintenance fleet.
Department heads and council members may be careful with a dollar, but they understand costs and benefits, and in the end, so do the taxpayers they represent. If you can clearly compare the cost of doing what’s needed against the cost of doing too little, it’s surprising how the purse strings can loosen.
Are you satisfied that your community does enough maintenance? If you are, Municipal Sewer & Water would be glad to tell your story so that others can learn from your example. Just drop a note to editor@mswmag.com and tell us briefly what you’re doing, how you made the case to your community’s leaders, and what you’ve accomplished as a result.
You’ll be helping lots of your counterpartsin the sewer and water system maintenance field. Because after all, the mechanic in that old oil filter commercial had it right: “The choice is yours. You can pay me now or … pay me later.”
Comments on this column or about any article in this publication may be directed to editor Ted J. Rulseh, 800/257-7222; editor@mswmag.com.
