Great  news from Barcelona! For the first time, a large majority of the Barcelona City Council supports ending the private management of water in the city. Barcelona En Comú believes that water is a human right, a basic service and a common good that should be under public, democratic control. Barcelona En Comú’s motion to remunicipalize the city’s water service has been supported by an absolute majority of the City Council

On Friday, November 25th, Barcelona En Comu presented a motion to take back direct public management of the water cycle, one of the main promises of our manifesto. This proposal was also one of the most popular among citizens in the participatory process carried out to define the Municipal Action Plan (the plan that guides city policy).

All the leftist groups of the Barcelona City Council voted in favor of the motion, meaning that the government can move forward with its plan to remunicipalize the water service in the metropolitan area. The water service is currently in the hands of the mixed society that controls distribution in the 23 municipalities of the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona (AMB), of which Agbar is the majority shareholder. The council also approved a similar motion by the CUP Barcelona.

Eloi Badia, Councilor for Presidency, Water and Energy, said that “today an absolute majority has voted more transparency, higher service quality, and lower tariffs. Today is a historic moment because a majority of the council has said that things must change.”

Savings for the city and savings for citizens

According to data from the Court of Auditors, public management is 18% cheaper and results in losses that are 23% lower and investments that are 18% higher. A comparison of water tariffs in Catalan municipalities indicates that private management is 25% more expensive than public management.

These savings would obviously mean a reduction in tariffs. Badia has said that water bills could be reduced by at least 10%, 38.7 million euros in total. 29M € could be saved from industry profits and 9.7M € from the knowledge levy. “The best social rate is one that does not include unnecessary expenses. We must respond to neighbors who can not face bills that have risen 85% in the last 10 years,” he added.

This process is based on precedents in large cities such as Paris, Berlin and Naples that have demonstrated the advantages of having a service under 100% public management, as well as in Catalan towns such as Arenys de Munt and Montornès del Vallès.

This is the beginning of a path that can be long and complex. Barcelona En Comú will continue to work for public services and the common good of all citizens.

Article by David Sanchez of Food and Water Europe

Just one year ago we were arguing about how Spain was still resisting the last wave of water privatization, as a result of austerity policies and debt, seasoned with corruption scandals.

But as a result of the local and regional elections a year ago, the tide changed. As a reaction to the long-term crisis, attacks to public services and corruption in traditional parties, many citizen movements organized to run for the elections, with great success in Madrid, Barcelona, Zaragoza, Ferrol, Santiago, Cádiz, Coruña and Valencia, among others.

One of the key achievements of those movements was to introduce in the public sphere the debate on how to manage public services, like water. By the end of 2015, 57 percent of the population in Spain received their tap water from a private operator. One of the most worrying consequences is that more than 500,000 families receive water cut off warnings every year, according to data from the Spanish public water companies association.

Valladolid, a city of around 300,000 inhabitants and capital of the northwestern region of Castilla y León, took the first big move a few weeks ago. The local government announced that the city would recover public control of water management, 20 years after the privatization of Aguas de Valladolid, when the contract expires in July 2017. Aguas de Valladolid is now part of the AGBAR-Suez group.

The reasons for remunicipalization sound familiar: underinvestment in infrastructure, high tariffs and lack of democratic control over such an important resource, among others. These are the same problems that led more than 200 cities worldwide to take back control of the water systems in the last 15 years.

Remunicipalizing a public service is a complex process. Valladolid will create a public company that will hire the current 150 workers of Aguas de Valladolid so no expertise or jobs are lost. They announced investments of 178 million euros in the coming 15 years to renew the infrastructure. And even doing so, tariffs will increase less than a third compared to the period where management was private.

This is great news for the citizens of Valladolid, but also a strategic milestone for the whole country. Valladolid is the biggest Spanish city to ever carry out such a process, and will surely pave the way for many other cities that have announced similar intentions. At the European level, it is a great symbol of this global trend. Spain is one of the countries most severely hit by austerity and water poverty and an inspiration for the movements still resisting privatization, like citizens in Greece.

Remunicipalization is a huge step, but it is not enough. Public management needs to be transparent, democratic and participatory. It needs to guarantee the human right to water, as well as investments to secure a sustainable supply. It is fundamental to design a sustainable management plan to protect the ecology of natural water cycles and maintain the quality of water in rivers and aquifers. It’s also important for maintaining good working conditions for water company employees, which need to be fully integrated into the democratic decision-making process.

There are many challenges ahead, but no one said that challenging the neoliberal dogma would be easy. Exciting times!

Comitato Acqua Pubblica Napoli: “Hands off ABC Napoli!”

In January this year, the transformation of ARIN S.p.a[1] into ABC Napoli[2] was concluded, ending a cycle of struggles which started 10 years ago, when the resolution of 23 November, 2004 allowed the private sector to manage the integrated water services of the entire ATO2 district in Southern Italy (comprising 136 communes from the provinces of Naples and Caserta in the Campania region).

The committees of Naples and Caserta, the public water committees together with a widespread citizen movement fought and obtained the withdrawal of the resolution. Since then we have repeatedly asked the Municipal Administration of Naples to start the transformation of the corporation into a special public company in order to eliminate the pursuit of profit and the potential sale of ARIN shares to the private. What the former Municipal Council under Mayor Iervolino and Budget Councilor Realfonzo were unable to achieve after the referendum victory, now became possible and the present Council (Mayor De Magistris and Branch Councilor Lucarelli) put in place the transformation. Naples is the first city in Italy to have re-municipalized its water service.

This transformation stimulated such enthusiasm and expectation for change that a number of Italian cities, urged by by their own committees, started to plan their course towards re-municipalization.

To give a boost to this commitment to change, we suggested that the Municipal Administration should co-organize a convention of Mayors, Administrations and committees in Naples. If the city of Naples succeeded in re-municipalizing, re-municipalization is possible and, mostly, necessary.

Preparations for the convention, postponed from March to April, began in a shilly-shallying atmosphere and we started to understand that things were not moving in the right direction. Moreover, the February elections had weakened the political position of the Mayor and of his majority. It had also led to the “broad agreements” government summoned by Napolitano. This government is for the privatization of public services, in concordance with the Troika (IMF, ECB, European Commission), a framework that threatens the very existence of ABC Napoli. At the Convention on 24 April, we drew attention to the upcoming difficulties and reiterated with conviction that we here to fight. Hands off ABC Napoli!

We asked and continue to ask the Municipal Administration to “secure” the position of ABC Napoli by attending to many unresolved problems:

Relations with the ATO district (now under supervision but retaining full powers[3])

• Industrial plan
• Past management evaluation
• Economical and tarification plan
• Incomplete board of directors

Over the past months we have pressed the City Council, but with poor results; members were either ambiguous, minimizing or denying. Obviously, relations with the City Council were interrupted. The recent events relative to the increase in tariffs (in Italy, Naples’ Administration was very quick to approve the AEEG[4] – Electric Energy and Gas Authority directives instead of arguing against them) and the Regional Bill designed to encourage SII (Integrated Water Service) privatization is seriously jeopardizing the fate ABC Napoli. While it is impossible to fully grasp the politics that are developing around the SII management in Campania right now, there is one thing that is absolutely certain: we will do everything in our power to fight this Bill.

Hands off ABC Napoli!

Comitato Acqua Pubblica Napoli

[1] ARIN (Azienda Risorse Idriche di Napoli – Water Resources Company of Naples) S.p.a was a corporation responsible for water management in Naples. The S.p.a (società per azioni) is the Italian equivalent of the public limited companies.

[2] ABC Napoli is a spécial public company (azienda spéciale) which is the italian équivalent of a public institution of industrial and commercial nature. ABC for “Acqua Bene Comune” which in English is “Water as a Commons”.

[3] The ATO (Ambito Territoriale Ottimale) is now chaired by a representative of the government and not by the mayor of the largest municipality. The ATO continues to decide the price of water to be applied in all municipalities.

[4] AEEG (Autorità per l’Energia Elettrica e il Gas – the Authority for Electricy and Gas) is the agency responsible for the regulation of competition and pricing in the field of electricity and gas. The AEEG adopted a new method of pricing water services which is against the referendum result of June 2011.

Berlin Water back in Public Hands – Bye, bye Veolia!

By Martin Pigeon

“A business of real public importance can only be carried on advantageously upon so large a scale as to render the liberty of competition almost illusory […] It is much better to treat it at once as a public function.” – J.S. Mill, 1872

Almost a year has now passed since Remunicipalisation: Putting Water Back Into Public Hands was first released. This book examined the ongoing trend of water “remunicipalisation” – how cities are taking back control of their water systems. It is exciting to give it a second life today, in the form of a Spanish book, as well as through a short animation film.

Researching and writing this book was intense: five urban water systems were studied, one per continent, with radical geographical, political and cultural differences among them.

As I looked at water struggles all over the world, more and more it felt as if I were observing the circulation of life’s blood. The cities had a lot in common: their water systems were technology-intensive, comparably standardized, costly, vital… And for at least these two last reasons they had been privatized. Many investors love monopolies, and urban water networks are natural monopolies on a lifeline resource. However, after a period of significant expansion in private water management globally (1980-2000), the trend was reversing.

Lessons from remunicipalisation

As campaigners against water privatization, we encourage public water management: we welcome this new trend, but to what extent is it good news? Our research found that:

• remunicipalisation can save money for public budgets, and sometimes a lot such as in Paris where the city saved enough to reduce water tariffs by 8% without endangering investments and financial stability
• it always allows for more transparency
• it can increase the system’s efficiency (performing to best technical capacity as opposed to just complying with legal standards)
• it often puts extension of coverage and equal access back on the agenda[1]

In short, remunicipalisation works!

But other findings are equally interesting. The most striking one perhaps is that the decision to remunicipalize is usually taken mainly on financial and technical grounds. Pro-public water political campaigning does help, but the mere fact that private management fails to run systems in a technically sound and politically acceptable way can be enough to lead to remunicipalisation. In short, privatization is its own worst enemy.

Ongoing struggles

The remunicipalisation wave continues. Veolia just lost one of its oldest contracts in France in the city of Rennes. A city spokesperson explained: “There’s a contradiction between the council’s aim to reduce water consumption and that of the operator whose interest is to see it increase.”

The water companies’ business model for municipal contracts is outdated, at least in the EU. Consumption slowly but steadily decreased over the past 20 years, limiting revenue while costs skyrocketed, and the resulting hike in water tariffs has generated political discontent and high scrutiny. Cities that don’t remunicipalize renegotiate their contracts fiercely: it is common for water multinationals to give 30% rebates these days to keep their contracts, hoping they can still recoup their costs later.

They are now trying to restructure their businesses, with two major options:

1. Veolia seems to focus more on traditional engineering works and services for public and private clients, as well as new ones such as the mining and oil industry (fracking requires enormous amounts of water and involves high clean-up costs).
2. Suez seems to try to capture the very management of the resource and the politics of water through “integrated water governance” contracts, trying to sell cities “water health contracts” and co-opting the language of the progressive water world.

One remark: the European Commission seems to completely ignore all of the above. It has never promoted water privatization as enthusiastically as today, imposing this failed model on Greece, Portugal and everywhere it’s given the chance. It has for the first time included water in Internal Market legislation on concession contracts, causing an uproar – and intense corporate lobbying – in Brussels these days. Indeed, “the Commission believes that the privatisation of public utilities, including water supply firms, can deliver benefits to the society when carefully made.”(EC, DG ECFIN 2012)

Making ‘public’ work

Public ownership is a pre-requisite but never a guarantee for better performance. “Public” must go hand in hand with democratization of the service. Only that way can challenges of the water sector be tackled in a sustainable way:

How can we finance costly infrastructure without giving control to corporations or banks?

How can water management be integrated in urban and land planning, in forestry and agriculture policies to improve resilience, resource quality and adapt to climate change?

How to fight other forms of privatization such as the end-of-pipe technological approach to pollution, or useless and dangerous ideas such as water rights markets?

How to translate these technical issues into political issues that all can understand and contribute to?

Remunicipalisation advances these debates by raising water issues on the political agenda and is a golden opportunity to try and solve them.

Martin Pigeon is a researcher and campaigner with Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO). CEO is a research and campaign group working to expose and challenge the privileged access and influence enjoyed by corporations and their lobby groups in EU policy making.

 Here you can read the research