D.C. Council member Zachary Parker introduced legislation last week that would prohibit DC Water from shutting off residential customers for nonpayment, a practice he called “inhumane.”
Citing the utility’s own slogan, Parker named the bill the “Water Is Life Amendment Act of 2024.”
One Brookland resident, who asked to remain anonymous, described her experience with a water disconnection as “nerve-wracking and infuriating.” She found herself without water just before Thanksgiving in 2018, when she expected to host her mother, her siblings and their families for the first time.
“When you don’t have running water in a building, it’s considered uninhabitable,” the Ward 5 homeowner said. “So why would you do that to people?”
Parker’s bill, introduced Feb. 1, also aims to provide wider access to water utility assistance programs. Some provisions would make it easier for residents to enroll in extended repayment plans, and others would allow tenants to work directly with DC Water if their landlord fails to pay the bills for which they’re responsible.
“DC Water supports the elements of the bill designed to ensure that residential tenants can access their water bill and utility assistance programs intended to help avoid service interruptions,” DC Water spokesperson John Lisle said in an emailed statement. “However, DC Water strongly opposes the proposal to ban disconnections for non-payment. Such a ban would violate DC Water’s Congressionally mandated financial independence, will cause rates to increase [and] violate bondholder agreements, and is not necessary because DC Water offers robust financial assistance to customers.”
DC Water disconnected residential customers for nonpayment 2,875 times in 2023, according to the utility.
Payment Paradoxes
The homeowner in Brookland had her home’s water shut off after her bill jumped to $1,100 because of a running toilet she didn’t know about. Once disconnected, she had to pay the full bill in order to get service back: DC Water wouldn’t allow her to use any assistance program or payment plan that she might have had access to if she’d caught the problem before the disconnection.
“It’s like, you all cut it off, and I can’t even do a payment plan — at that point, I’m trying to offer you money, but you insist that if I don’t pay it all, you won’t turn my water back on,” she said. “The system is clearly designed for punishment.”
The “Water is Life” act would require the utility to allow any eligible resident to sign up for payment plans, regardless of the status of their account.
DC Water’s current policy also includes a $55 termination fee and a $50 reconnection fee for anyone whose water is cut off. Representatives from the utility declined to provide exact details on what criteria they use to decide if it will disconnect a household, though any property “delinquent for 30 days or more from the date of the bill” may be cut off.
When DC Water paused shutoffs during the pandemic, it saw increased delinquencies, Lisle, the DC Water spokesperson, wrote in an email. The utility estimated that the financial impact of a ban on shutoffs “could be close to $30 million each year,” and said that the lost revenue would result in higher rates for all customers and reduced funding for improvement and maintenance projects.
Both Parker and DC Water cited Chicago, which prohibited water shutoffs as of 2022, as an example — but reached opposite conclusions.
“Chicago’s overall customer delinquencies appear to have doubled after the implementation of a similar policy,” Lisle wrote.
Parker said in Chicago, “there have not been any significant financial impediments to that utility service, so we do not anticipate this undermining the utility or its financial stability.”
According to Parker, it’s actually more expensive for the utility to turn the water off and back on again than it would be just to continue service. The council member argued in the new bill’s introductory letter that DC Water’s ability to impose a lien on a property associated with a delinquent account would be enough to incentivize payment.
“The message here should not be, and is not, that it’s okay for you not to pay your bill,” Parker said. “DC water would still have tools at its disposal to hold people accountable… Most people want to pay their bills, but, for a variety of reasons, can’t. And it’s inhumane to have people in the District of Columbia living in properties where they don’t have access to water.”
Water Disconnections Can Pose Serious Health Threats
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the D.C. Council ordered a moratorium on all utility shutoffs for unpaid bills. That ended in January 2022, though COVID is very much still around in the District and globally.
Places like D.C. that stopped water disconnections in response to COVID-19 saw significantly fewer coronavirus cases and deaths than jurisdictions that continued to allow them, according to research from the nonprofit Food & Water Watch. If the whole country had adopted a moratorium on water shutoffs, the researchers estimated, it might have saved over 9,000 lives.
“Water shutoffs pose serious threats to public health and wellbeing, allowing diseases to spread and causing trauma for affected families,” said Mary Grant, the director for Food & Water Watch’s Public Water for All Campaign, in an email. “D.C. should join a growing number of cities from Chicago to Los Angeles in stopping this punitive practice of denying water over unaffordable bills.”
In addition to aiding the spread of contagious disease, some water quality advocates say disconnections can increase risks for lead contamination. The longer water sits stagnant in a pipe, the more likely it is to cause corrosion, allowing lead to leach into the water.
Paul Schwartz, an activist who has been pushing for D.C. to address its lead service lines since the city’s 2004 water crisis, described Parker’s bill as “long overdue.”
“Within 24 hours of water being shut off, lead rises to dangerous levels at the tap,” Schwartz said in an emailed comment. “I wonder if anyone at DC Water has gone a day without water? How can you cook, reconstitute formula, or take a bath without water? Water is a human right, not a commodity that people can live without.”
Shutoffs Could Widen Racial Wealth Gap as Rates Keep Rising
DC Water’s rates have increased by 87% over the last decade, and are projected to increase another 80% over the next decade, according to a September letter from more than 40 organizations urging D.C. Council members to ban utility shutoffs.
As of 2022, more than 10,000 households in the District had water bills at least 90 days overdue, and that debt was primarily concentrated in Wards 4, 5, 7 and 8, said Selah Goodson Bell, an energy justice campaigner with the Center for Biological Diversity. Goodson Bell said he hopes Council member Parker’s legislation would lead to similar policies for energy utilities.
“This bill is a great start toward transforming the District’s broken water utility system that too often fails renters, low-income households, and Black and Hispanic families,” he said in an email. “The council needs to pass this bill and then deliver comprehensive utility justice in the District by also banning residential power and heat shutoffs for non-payment.”
Water disconnections disproportionately affect Black and Hispanic Washingtonians because, compared to white, non-Hispanic residents, they face higher water burdens — a term that describes the total percentage of income that goes toward water bills.
The median water burden of D.C.’s Black households is 51% higher than it is for white households, a 2021 study by the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy found.
DC Water offers several options for assistance to income-eligible customers, including extended payment programs, discounts on water and sewer services and emergency relief funds. However, less than 25% of Washingtonians eligible for repayment programs currently use them, Parker said.
The Brookland resident who faced a shutoff in 2018 leaned on family and friends for help to pay off the full bill. She stayed — with her dog — at a neighbor’s house until her water was turned back on two days later.
“I was very, very fortunate that I had the resources to pay it, and there are too many people that aren’t as fortunate,” she said. “I think there’s a war on the poor in this city. … And so many of these issues — most of them only affect the poor. And our agencies and our lawmakers, they have means, so these types of things just go unnoticed. It takes someone like Council member Parker to raise the issue, to force anyone to pay attention.”
If you are renting and there is no incentive to pay your water bill (shut off) people are not going to pay their water bill. People will need money for food, medicine, transportation and fun. Guess who gets stuck with the bill, the owner of the property. This is just another example
of how this city is anti landlord.
I agree with eliminating the random service fees and expanding access to assistance programs, but it’s ridiculous to eliminate shutoff option. It will just spiral out of control with people refusing to pay because they know they can get away with it. Has DC Council learned nothing from spikes in crime, increase in WMATA fare evasion, etc.? What sounds nice on paper isn’t always realistic.