The Montgomery County Taxpayers League supports Bill 105-25, the Washington Suburban Sanitation Commission (WSSC) Transparency and Reform Act of 2025. Together with the WSSC Reform Group, we urge the state legislature to approve this bill to restore service reliability, control rates, and reduce the risks of a taxpayer bailout with improved management, governance and policy.
Service disruptions, including the recent major water main break in the commercial center of downtown Bethesda, and a recent essential water use alert have become alarming. WSSCs proposed fiscal year 2026 budget requests a 9.8% rate increase, but rates are already double Fairfax’s for families greater than three people, and have increased annually since 2003 when the last reform effort ended.
Referencing the recent spate of water main breaks in the county, County Executive Elrich recently noted during a media briefing that the problem can be solved with higher rates to fund repair work.
But the problem is management, not money. Asset management standards are not being followed to manage risk and costs. Only 33 miles of water pipe and 25 miles of sewer pipe will be replaced out of thousands of miles in the distribution system. The budget does not disclose the cost of emergency repairs, and does not justify those costs against the capital costs of replacing more miles of pipe.
Further, capital budget priorities should be based on return on investment (ROI) criteria, The recently completed industry prestige project to upgrade the Piscataway sewage treatment plant cost $271 million, but has an ROI of just 1%, by our calculations. This is way below WSSC’s cost of capital and was approved without regard to shifting Prince George’s County sewage processing to the world-class Blue Plains facility in Washington, D.C. Increasing debt without an adequate return diverts resources away from pipe repair and replacement.
Turning to operations, WSSC is run as a cost-plus monopoly. The county delegation sponsored a benchmark study in 2021 that found WSSC costs were excessive in many instances when compared to neighboring water utilities. There are no management incentives for cost control. WSSC may be suffering from what economists call diseconomies of scale (being too big to control costs), and has twice the number of customers as Fairfax Water. The last state task force considered breaking WSSC up by county, but management agreed to cut costs instead. That lasted until 2003 when rates took off again.
Governance and policy reforms are also needed to bring down rates. WSSC is a state agency serving two counties with divided governance. Any reform must come from the state. Bill 105-25 could solve these problems, but WSSC is fighting it. In addition, Elrich has called for a “hold” in supporting the bill and the council concurred Jan.13.
Governance and policy challenges are as big as the management problems. The two county executives routinely rubber-stamp WSSC’s budget when making recommendations to the two councils. Worse, the two county executives appoint the members of the commission that supposedly independently governs WSSC, and the county executives also appoint key managers. This is a major conflict of interest, leaving the two councils as bystanders, receiving all the political cover they need from the county executives to perform their oversight with little accountability. Neutralized council oversight is compounded by the enabling legislation, which says that if the two councils don’t agree on a budget, the budget request by WSSC must be adopted. This shifts the entire burden of justifying the budget from WSSC management, the commissioners and the county executives onto the two hapless councils.
Even worse, the enabling legislation provides WSSC authority to levy an ad valorem property tax increase to pay its bills, which virtually guarantees poor cost management. In 2022 WSSC came very close to insolvency and use of its taxing authority when it only had two months of cash on hand to meet its payroll and pay vendors.
We ask you to write to your state delegation and say you want the state to perform the reviews and implement reforms for areas outlined in this bill.
Silver Spring resident Gordie Brenne is treasurer of the Montgomery County Taxpayers League, a non-profit, non-partisan 501(C)3.
