Advocate Summary

Issue:  Water Infrastructure & State Revolving Funds
Advocate:  National Association of Water Companies - Louis Jenny
Date of Interview: 7/19/02

Basic Background
Probably got started working on water infrastructure.  Well, this association represents private and public water utilities.  I’ll just assume you don’t know anything about the industry for a second, but there are, we’re just drinking water, we don’t do wastewater.  
	And there are probably four or five major associations that represent the drinking water industry in some way.  Some of them, AWA represents sort of the whole industry.  The Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies just represents the big municipals, Rural Water and we’re just the investor owned.
	We have generally historically all worked together pretty well, on a lot of issues, and we have different focuses.  I mean, because we’re privately owned, we do a lot of tax stuff and those guys, because they’re municipals, they don’t pay taxes.  So you know, it’s not just that we, it wasn’t so much that we fought against each other.  It was just, we had different focuses and stuff.
	And then issues like the Safe Drinking Water Act, we came together and worked together, a lot, on it, quite a bit.  This issue with the water infrastructure started bubbling up, god, it might be as much as four years ago.  Three to four years ago, when EPA started doing what they called the gap analysis.  That was sort of this, and it came out of stuff that was going on in Australia, actually.  
	The sort of work that water infrastructure, and they were using a very broad term, they included drinking water and wastewater stuff.  Just because of accidents of history, the infrastructure, a lot of different, what’s the word I’m looking for here ... the lives of the infrastructure, they put it in the ground and it has a certain amount of useful life to it.  And different generations of it were all coming, we’re all going to be coming to an end in the next ten to twenty years.  
	And then a lot of utilities were not prepared.  A lot of utilities weren’t even aware of it.  Because utility life is very long lived.  I mean, some of this stuff was put in originally, we’re talking about 1880’s, is just now coming to the end of its life.  Other stuff that went in after World War II was made out of different stuff.  And it had a shorter life.  And it’s also coming to an end right now.  So you had at least three or four of these generations.  
	And just a lot of because people, because you don’t see the pipes in the ground.  You don’t see this stuff.  Utilities, you just sort of don’t even think about it because it’s been there forever.  And they just don’t think about it.  Many utilities were on top of it, but many weren’t.  And the EPA was getting more and more aware of it.
Because of this, a big coalition started coming together.  And this was, at first, just the water folks, the drinking water and wastewater, the various drinking water and wastewater Associations.  They started reaching out to other groups, including folks like the governors and the various state groups that regulate these things.  And I think now they’ve gotten into labor unions and all sorts of stuff.  
	And we started going to these meetings.  This was like two and a half, three years ago.  And from the very beginning, we, the NAWC, were sort of different from the rest of the group because what they were looking for, the general thrust of what they were looking for was sort of a traditional big government.  
	It’s like, we’ve got this huge problem, and the federal government has got to step up to the plate and come op with some big bucks to get us out of it.  Slightly different political playing field last year we had budget surpluses, you know, we weren’t in the middle of terrorist things and things like that.  
	So they had a certain, there was a certain rationale to what they were doing, but I still think they were kind of kidding themselves because they were going to put together this huge new federal program.  And people just don’t, there’s not been a stomach for that sort of stuff in twenty years.  
	And what it really came out of was -- it was really being driven by the wastewater side.  Slow me down if I’m going too fast here.  But the wastewater side, a lot of the folks who are involved with the wastewater industry really sort of cut their teeth on the old construction grants program, back in the sixties, seventies, eighties.  And this was just a huge grant program.
	It was just a, it was the fact that we had rivers, lakes and streams that were catching on fire, and nobody was dealing with it.  Just wastewater wasn’t being dealt with properly.  So the federal government put in this big, huge construction grant program.  They just doled out billions of dollars and they really wanted to resuscitate the system.  Really at the end of the day, they just wanted a big, huge grant program.  They wanted to leave it to the government; when they just called their Congressman and got a billion dollars to do what they needed to do.
	The drinking water side had never had anything like that.  We were not, we are a much older industry and it was always much more locally involved.  The federal government had never, other than setting environmental standards, had never been heavily involved with financing end of it. So there was a little bit of hesitation, just generally from the drinking water side, including the municipals, just because we’re getting into a world we haven’t been in before  And everyone knew that the construction grant program had a lot of problems, very inefficient, things like that.

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
Because of this, a big coalition started coming together.  And this was, at first, just the water folks, the drinking water and wastewater, the various drinking water and wastewater Associations.  They started reaching out to other groups, including folks like the governors and the various state groups that regulate these things.  And I think now they’ve gotten into labor unions and all sorts of stuff.  
	And we started going to these meetings.  This was like two and a half, three years ago.  And from the very beginning, we, the NAWC, were sort of different from the rest of the group because what they were looking for, the general thrust of what they were looking for was sort of a traditional big government.  

But, the drinking water groups were going along with it.  These meetings went on for quite a while, several months into it they formally started calling the Association of Water Infrastructure Network, WIN.  And they were starting to put together a first report.
	And this was, we’re probably talking, maybe early 2000.  I’d have to check my notes to see exactly what the dates are --  late ‘99 or early 2000.  And they started, the first report that they were putting together was supposed to be just about the scope of the problem.  It was a report to Congress, a lobbying document.  This is a huge problem.  We have to do something about it.  
	But in this report, they started talking more and more about the federal government, having to take on responsibility.  There was talk about grants.  And we just started having a problem with this.  And we don’t, we do not think that the grants is an efficient way to run the industry.  It’s full of inequities.  
	Also a very nuts and bolts issue is that our guys, the private little guys, there’s not history of these guys ever getting grants.  Usually with these government type programs, like the SRFs, even though our guys are supposed to have equal access, they often are not treated fairly.  They often are at the bottom of the list.  Just because people are very leery that this money is just going to go into stockholders and the owners’ pockets.  Even though that’s not allowed.  But there’s always this sort of an institutional worry about it.
	But really, I mean generally, the issue just came from, this is just not what the drinking water industry should be getting.  We should not be buying into a big, huge inefficient grant program.  The old construction grant programs in the wastewater side were riddled with problems.  An argument can be made, it did more damage to the industry than good.  I mean, it did just issue after issue that it just, you know, it ruined the ... I mean, there’s just tons of issues I could get into if you want me to.  
	We just came from a point of view that grants is not the way to go.  It was becoming increasingly clear that this water infrastructure group, that is what they wanted.  They wanted a big, huge grant program.  And they probably wanted that from the very beginning.  When we had endless rounds of meetings, because this is a group that was used to working together pretty well.  Endless round of meetings, even our most senior executives were coming in, our presidents and the CEOs of our companies to meet with their folks.  I mean it was just, it’s very clear that it’s just, we had a philosophical difference almost.  
	It was really the first; one of the first times we’d ever really dealt with financial stuff, which is why we were just going in a completely different direction.  You know, you have a much more business type thing, and they don’t look to the federal government to bail them out.  It’s just a different boss, I think.
	So we ended up, we did not sign onto that first report, but we stayed sort of going to the WIN meetings, and voicing our concerns with them.  They started working on a second report.  The first one was what the industry would be doing, the size of the problem.
	And the second one was supposed to be, all right, this is what Congress has to do to solve the problem.  And we started, the second one, it was when the second one, they got to the nuts and bolts discussion about the second one, and it became clear that we were not going to be able to stay with it.  We were going to have to break from these guys because they were just going off.  
	They wanted a big, huge grant program.  They wanted 57 billion dollars over the next five years, just in grants out to the states, or out to the utilities, directly to utilities.  They wanted essentially no assurances that this money was going to go to utilities that actually needed it.  They screamed and yelled because they didn’t want strings attached, but what it came right down to was that, it was all just some kind of political thing.  You know, cities and towns that were most politically correct, that had connected, that had Congressmen that would, most senior ones would get it.
	I mean, they didn’t want any sort of demonstration of need, environmental need, financial need, anything.  Plus they just wanted this huge chunk of money that was just not politically realistic.  And a lot of our guys thought, there’s this huge grant program there.  This could be the end of our industry, candidly speaking.  That’s the sort of stuff.  That’s just the sort of thing I wouldn’t want, it would probably be the end of the growth of our industry, the private carriers.  
	Because who would privatize if there’s this free money, if you’re a municipal.  And no one thinks that privates guys would ever get it.  So it would probably be the end of the growth of our industry and it could be the death of our industry within ten years.
	That was just what a few of our guys were saying.  I mean, some of them were not nearly as pessimistic.  A lot of them were just -- this is just bad.  It’s a bad way to run the industry.  It’s a bad way to run; it would be a wildly inefficient way to run the industry.
	So when the second report came out, 2002, it must have been earlier last year, early 2001, that that one came out.  And we pulled out.  We were just like, all right, we cannot do this.  And we set up a separate coalition, which was called the H2O coalition.  
	At this point, WIN had 40, 45 members, with us, who broke out, and two other groups.  A national council on public private partnerships, and the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association set up a separate coalition and we started putting out press releases, started putting out issue papers about what we were doing.  When they first put out, when they put out a second report about what Congress should do, we had a, not exactly a  press conference, but we had , we put out some press releases, so it essentially taking some swipes at it.  
	And a lot of people on that side, municipal folks that we’d been, you know, were pretty angry with us.  Because they felt that we had, we had been sitting in those meetings all this time, and then all of a sudden, at the last minute, we pulled out but we were very honest in these meetings.  I mean, this had been going on for two years, about where we were going.  And we made it very clear, weeks out, that we weren’t going to be able to sign onto this report, and that our folks had serious problems with it.  But still people were angry with us.  
	And then what we were able to do, because the WIN was such a big organization, I mean, I have to give them this, they were very, very, they have been, and continue to be very effective in getting the message out there.  They raised a lot of money.  They hired some top notch political lobbying firms.  I don’t know how top notch, but expensive, actually I think they were saying some strange stuff.
	But yeah, and they really did a very good job of getting attention to the problem.  But we had no money.  We were just a little, it wasn’t like our guys were going to give us a special assessment and give us hundreds and thousands of dollars for lobbying things, so it was just basically us here.  And we were, NAWC was really leading it.  The other two folks are very small associations and they do all sorts of stuff, not just drinking water stuff.  
	So they were just sort of signatories.  They just sort of signed along with us, just so it wasn’t just NAWC, but it really, I mean running it was really us.  But what we were able to do very effectively, I mean shockingly effectively.  It is because we had this big group spending a lot of money, in the press, we were able to sort of crowbar that or, the press they sort of needed the other side of the story, so we were able to just jump on their press all the time.  
	And WIN was out there spending all this money putting together press conferences and getting attention to the issue.  We were able to just, I mean, typing out a press release and put it out and we would get equal coverage in these stories.  This was all industry press.  There wasn’t much beyond the industry press.  But that’s all you really need.
	And then, again, WIN was very, very, in the same way, WIN was very, very effective at getting Congress’ attention.  They started having all these hearings.  And you have to have balanced hearings.  So WIN would get invited to testify, and so would we.  So we were at the hearing, we were sort of like equal footing, even though they were this huge organization, with hundreds of thousands of dollars, and it was just sort of us, you know.  
	So I mean, we testified last year, I think, at six hearings, which is ... I think in the eight years I’ve been here, before last  year, we had testified maybe at four.  I mean, we’re just a small association.  We don’t do, we just haven’t had the opportunity.  Last year, we did six, it was nuts.  Just because all the various Congressional committees, and they’re split up, and have jurisdiction over this and their subcommittees were having hearings on it, so every time they would invite us to testify.  
	Plus we were out there saying things they wanted to hear.  WIN had this idea that Congress was going to come through and fund this huge new program, and there was no, I mean, that is not a Republican thing to do.  Big, huge grant program.  And the Democrats even knew.  That was just not in the cards.  The surplus was dwindling, this idea of a huge program.  There are less and less Democrats who see themselves as sort of big government Democrats every day.  It was just, it was never a politically tenable thing.
	So we were up there talking to these staffers, behind the scenes, just sort of saying, you know, we think we should do this.  There’s ways out of this.  We questioned everything that WIN was asserting.  We questioned the size of the problem that they were saying.  We were saying a lot of the problem could be solved through better asset management, through creative public private partnerships.  We thought that any new program, any of the money should go through the SRF, which is loans rather than grants.  
	It was exactly what the staffers wanted to hear because no way we’re going to do this huge new grant program.  WIN’s telling us there’s this huge problem.  We’re going in there saying, well, there’s a problem but it’s only a problem if nobody does anything about it.  There’s a lot of management things and creative things that you can do to cut into a lot of the problem.
	So we were getting a lot of, I mean we were getting support from both sides of the aisle, both House and the Senate.  And they were saying, now wait a minute, I don’t know where they’re coming from on this stuff.  But so we were getting a lot of, we were able to testify at all these hearings and that just got us a lot of attention.
	
	So anyway, at some point, probably the end of last year, we started committee’s term from putting together, from having hearings, not actually putting together legislation.  And legislation started coming out, particularly S. 1961 in the Senate, and that was just perfect.  The way I’ve described it to people is, you’re lucky it was, what we do in a bill, just to get twenty-five percent of what you wanted.  
	But that bill looked like we could have written it.  I mean, everything that we were looking for was in that bill.  They worked within the SRF.  They put in a lot of incentives to get utilities to be doing the right thing.  You know, before they can get loans they have to look at creative public private partnerships and they have to look at consolidation.  
	They have to prove that they’re doing good asset management.  They’re charging full cost to and a lot of these utilities got, a lot of municipalities got into a problem just because they’re not charging anything for their service.  It’s often not their fault.  It’s usually mayors and city councils won’t let them raise the rates, but still, it’s a problem because they’re not charging.
	So I mean, there’s just all this stuff in this bill that was exactly what we wanted.  One of the things we were pushing for, too, which we just got laughed out of WIN when we first started talking about this, was a utility grate assistance program, directed at customers, not at utilities.  So customers, you know, disadvantaged customers who can’t pay their water bills, to meet this infrastructure problem, rates were going to have to go up, is what we were saying.  
	It’s just, there’s a problem here and in some places, rates are going to have to go up.  Because in some places, people are not charging the full possible rate for service.  Rates are going to go up.  There’s some people who can’t afford us.  So what we should be doing, federal government should be assisting those who can’t charge the rate.  They shouldn’t be helping out the utility because there’s probably people in this utility who can easily afford their rates to go up.  
	I mean, literally we’re talking in some towns, some cities, where rates aren’t even ten dollars a month, fifteen dollars a month.  So even a fifty percent increase in rates, which we would never be that big, you know, we’re talking about a couple of dollars.  Most people probably hardly even notice that.  But there are some people who would have a problem with that.  So we were saying, let’s assist them.  
	And there’s precedent for this.  There’s a program which is an energy thing, a home energy thing that helps people pay their, pay for heat in the summer.  And the precedence for this was something we should look at.  That was even in the bill.  I mean, there was a version of it was in the bill.  
	It was just -- they were great bills.  And in the bill that came out, the transportation infrastructure committee, was also really good.  I mean, it was just wastewater, so we were less involved with that, and it didn’t quite have everything we wanted but it was still a really good bill.  And it was not, I assume that the Water Infrastructure Network was very angry because they had spent all this money and, frankly, are nowhere.
	And the bills have moved through the mark up process in both the T and I committee and the Senate, environment of public works committee.  And you have, these bills are all introduced bipartisan.  So you have bipartisan support for what we were looking for.  Nobody was looking for a big grant program.  There was nobody looking for what WIN was looking for.

We have never done much press here, on this - this was the first time I ever wrote a press release. I just kind of wrote it up circulated it to some of my colleagues at other offices that have done them before and sent it out. We were lucky, we had a good argument and you know they say sometimes you are lucky in your enemies, it was easy to leverage against them, they got such media coverage and the media always wants the other side so they were coming to us for quotes from the other side, so now it is good I’ve made some contacts and have a relationship with some media people.  

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
None mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
Yeah.  I mean, you look at the bills that were introduced, you look at the sponsors.  I mean, they were in the Senate.  1961 it was introduced.  You had Senator Jim Jeffords (I-VT), Senator (Robert) Smith (R-NH) and chairman and the ranking Republican on the full committee, and you have Senator (Bob) Graham (D-FL), chairman of the subcommittee, and Senator (Michael) Crapo (R-ID), the ranking Republican.  They introduced 1961, which is our wish list.  And we have very, very relations with both of their staffs on both sides.  I mean, we sort of, we didn’t need to have one member in there fighting for us, because we had the chairman.  I mean, we had the chairmen and the ranking Republicans on both sides of the aisle.
	The House has been a little bit different.  Just because the only action we’ve seen so far on the House side is on the wastewater side, and we’re really not wastewater people.  So it’s been a little bit different.  We’ve been working with (John) Duncan (R-TN) who introduced the original bill.  He’s the subcommittee chairman on the T and I committee, Congressman Duncan.  And his staff has a very good relationship with him.
	Now so far, energy and commerce, which has the drinking water jurisdiction, hasn’t done anything.  They haven’t come up with a bill.  But we have very and they don’t see a need for a bill, for various reasons.  But if we take this on and work with them it’s is good for us.  I don’t have a problem with that.
	But I think if Energy and Commerce ever does come up with a bill, everything I’ve heard from talking with the staff, I think we’re going to be just fine there.  I don’t think there’s really any change; it’s going to have to take real dramatic change in, I don’t know what.  We’re going to have to cut back on the surplus.  Some real old school Democrats are going to have to get back in charge of these committees for any of this stuff to ever get anywhere.  It’s just the sort of -- and there’s still everything we hear is just still clinging to this idea of come up with a big, huge grant program.  I can’t imagine.

Targets of Direct Lobbying
Yeah, I mean, you know, the issues are always sort of involved.  The drinking water stuff is in front of the Environment and Public Works committee in the Senate, and the Energy and Commerce in the House.  I mean, it just doesn’t matter.  Of course, you stay close to people who are in important positions there.  
	Because we’re drinking water, we hadn’t had as much impact, virtually no experience with the transportation and infrastructure committee, which has the wastewater jurisdiction.  So we were sort of having to introduce ourselves to them first, but we still found a very good hearing out of that.  And this was a side that WIN was, that was a committee that WIN ... because WIN is really being run by the wastewater guys.  AMSA, Association of Metropolitan Sewer Agencies.
	So even, that was sort of their base.  I mean, they thought that the transportation and infrastructure committee, and their water resources subcommittee, was going to be sort of where they were going to be operating.  But even when we were in our meeting with their staffers, they were like, the staffers were telling us, the idea of a huge grant program is just not in the cards.  And they were saying this almost eighteen months ago.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
[The H2O Coalition]

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
The environmental groups were always a little squirrely.  Some of the environmental groups, oh gosh I can’t remember their names but it was really Clean Water Action.  They were the ones who were more involved with this.  The National Resources Defense Council didn’t get us involved with this.  But Clean Water Action actually was part of them and has signed onto some of their stuff, but they never really saluted to the company line, to the party line.  Because when they would be brought in to testify, they sounded a lot more like advocating stuff than we were saying.  And they were being very leery of endorsing WIN exactly because of the sprawl issue.
	So here they were signing onto this WIN stuff sometimes, sometimes not, and WIN was always promoting them and saying, oh we have environmentalists on board.  But then when the environmentalists were actually asked about this stuff, and were actually brought in, they really weren’t.  And I think it also ticked off WIN sometimes.
Clean Water Action headed up a letter.  I wonder if I can dig that out.  I probably have it somewhere.  Yeah, they signed onto, I’m going to guess the second WIN report.  They signed the thing and then they also attached a letter to someone on the Hill basically disavowing themselves.  It was hilarious, because they put their name on this thing, and then they sent them this letter saying, well, we don’t really agree with ninety percent of it.  So why did you sign on?  And why did WIN let them sign on?
	We were, we had already been banished from WIN at that point, so I don’t know the internal, what went on behind that.  But yeah, the environmentalists were always a little bit squirrelly on the issue.  Which is fine with us.  I mean, we were, we reached out to them a few times saying, I think we can work in coalition here.  But they never (inaudible) on their own so they never really got anywhere.
	We also reached out to the states, early on, the state administrators and the governors.  Because they were leery about the seed grant program, too.  They liked working with (inaudible) access to them.  And at first we had, we were getting somewhere.  But they ended up sort of going off and doing their own thing, too, which again was fine, as long as they weren’t with WIN. That was the Association of Safe Drinking Water Administrators, ASDWA, that we were working with.  They were leery of a lot of stuff that WIN was pushing forth for a lot of the same reasons we were because it was just like, not the way to run a rodeo.  But then they ended up, the NGA, National Governors Association, was part of WIN for a while and they ended up breaking off, too, because they were leery of it.  But they didn’t want to get involved with us, I think it was more sort of for global reasons because we had kind of been the bad guys, as far as WIN was concerned, we were the bad guys.  And they kind of just didn’t want to align themselves, which is fine.  
	I mean, we didn’t, I didn’t have a problem with that.  As long as they weren’t part of WIN, that was fine with me and so the Drinking Water Administrators and the Governors, for obvious reasons, work very close together, so they ended up going off with the governors and you know, we sort of stay in contact.  I won’t say we coordinate at all, but there’s sort of been similar arguments.  During the early part, the early mid part of this whole discussion, there were very similar arguments that we were making, I think.  But they were not ever part of our organization.

[Opposition]
The WIN Coalition 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
We actually shied away a little bit from the problem isn’t that big, partly because one of the first things that, when this process got going ... I mean we did say at the beginning, one of the first hearings, it was like, this is just impossible to know.  We had heard the testimony.  It’s just impossible to know.  We’re talking about twenty years.  We’re talking about a very big industry.  We don’t know what the problem really is. 
	We kind of got away from that issue a little bit, just because one of the first things that Congress did in the House was they asked CBO to give them some sense of how big the problem is.  But it may be the other way around, I can’t remember.  But both CBO and GAO were asked.
	And they started getting testimony from them saying, you know, WIN is probably exaggerating things.  It’s a worst case scenario.  And they finally did come up with some formal reports just fairly recently, in the last few weeks.  So we sort of left that to them.  We were like, you know, it’s probably better coming from CBO and GAO than coming from us.  But we did, we have, and that’s always been sort of part of our argument, that we don’t know how big the problem is, but it’s not a trillion dollars.
	Our argument was more that there are other creative things that should be done first, before the federal government steps in.  And that grants are just dangerous.  There’s tons of precedents for grants just wasting huge amounts of money and doing all sorts of damage.
	And an argument that really got a lot of traction was that, in the old construction grants program, you have all this evidence of, or examples of, utilities being built that were just way over built.  You know, some Congressman giving it huge grant for a fairly small city and its wastewater system that was way beyond what they needed, wasting incredible amounts of money.  

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
Plus just the nature of financing, this is another argument that got a lot of traction.  The appropriations process is not consistent.  So some years there would be money, and some years there wouldn’t.  
	And so the contractors, the people who do this for a living, it would ruin them.  Because some years, they had more business than they could handle, literally, and then next year the money would dry up and there’d be no money.  And it ruined domestic equipment manufacturers.
	And that’s why the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association was part of our group, because they didn’t want to ... in one year, there was more money than, there was more business than they could handle.  The next year, it would dry up completely and nobody would do anything because they were waiting for the next federal, the next appropriation - when the money would come in.  There was no way to plan long range, and it ruined the domestic equipment manufacturers business.  And a lot of the stuff went overseas, because the domestic stuff just dried up.
	And because of that, there’s virtually, there’s almost, there’s very little, they’re just getting back on their feet now, twenty years later.  Because a lot of these companies that have been around for generations were wiped out in a matter of a couple of years.  And that all the research and development, all the innovation, was being done abroad because that was the place, it was the only place it could be done.  Because there was just no way it could be done here because there was no consistency in funding.
	Even now, I mean if you talk to anybody, all of the innovation in the drinking water, and the waste, the water in general, drinking water and wastewater, has all been abroad.

	I mean, we were saying, well, first of all, we don’t think it’s a trillion dollars.  We don’t know what it is, but it’s probably half that, at most.  And there’s a lot of things that utilities should do first before they go to the federal government.  You know, consolidation, asset management thing.  There were all sorts of opportunities for creative financing and working with the private sector.  There’s just tons of things, and there’s plenty of precedents out there with utilities doing this.  And making it work would require huge sums of money.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
We really always talked about the same thing.  I think we thought earlier on that we were going to have to tailor things differently between the Republicans and the Democrats.  But it became very clear because your instinct is that the Democrats would be more interested in sort of government thing, but they were not.  This is not politically tenable.  We don’t want to be seen as creating a big, huge new government program.  We really didn’t.  
	We had very similar arguments on both sides of that.  In fact, a lot of the meetings we had were with Democrats and Republicans.  We’d sit down and talk with all of them.  And say the exact same thing.  We never really felt the need to stress different things with different folks, which you would expect.

Nature of the Opposition
[WIN Coalition]
 
Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
They were basically saying there’s this huge problem. Yeah.  There’s this huge problem.  They need a trillion dollars, which is the number they kept coming up with.  They need a trillion dollars over the next twenty years.  The problem was that trillion dollars.  This is a huge problem and everything’s going to fall apart if the federal government was going to come in.  That was really their, as near as I can tell, that was their argument.  That it was a huge problem and that there was no way that local utilities can deal with this.
	I mean, we were saying, well, first of all, we don’t think it’s a trillion dollars.  We don’t know what it is, but it’s probably half that, at most.  And there’s a lot of things that utilities should do first before they go to the federal government.  You know, consolidation, asset management thing.  There were all sorts of opportunities for creative financing and working with the private sector.  There’s just tons of things, and there’s plenty of precedents out there with utilities doing this.  And making it work would require huge sums of money.
	So they didn’t, the problem was they did, their argument was, as near as I could tell, was just always, it’s a huge problem, and the federal government has got to step in.  And they just never, you know, we were saying some stuff to the federal staffers.  We were punching a lot of holes in their arguments and they never really refuted them, is the way I look at it.  
	I think that the WIN we saw was just a little group, and the private guys, and they don’t know what they’re doing.  And there’s this little group, we’re the ones who have all the money and we don’t have to pay any attention to them.  But the problem, so they never, they never really, we were attacking…I won’t say attacking, but we were offering an alternative to what they were saying.
	And they never answered what we were saying, near as I can tell.  They never really said, you know, what the H2O coalition is saying is not true because of boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.  They always stuck to, and still stick to this, this is a huge problem.  Everyone’s going to go to hell in a hand basket, if the federal government doesn’t step up to the plate.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
None mentioned.

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
None mentioned.

Described as a Partisan Issue
No.

Venue(s) of Activity
Senate Environment and Public Works 
House Energy and Commerce 
House Transportation and Infrastructure

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
There is a bill now in the House and Senate.  It's been reported from the Senate

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Working to block any large federal grant program to improve water infrastructure.] 

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I’ve been here for eight years, I did campaign work before that, I worked on the Clinton campaign, and before that I was on the Hill for five years, went through the process from front desk to LD.

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We don’t do much research, more like intellectual grunt work.

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Three

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
It’s just me and Bong, and Peter, that’s the director and the executive director, we have 10 staff in all, we’re a pretty small organization.

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Institutions – Private drinking water utilities

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
200

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous