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wave-garden t1_ja01hhc wrote

Reply to comment by malakamanforyou in What’s one thing you love and hate about Baltimore? by AllThingsCorrect

Water treatment on the front and back end is expensive. Volume does matter, even if there’s a not a shortage of fresh water. Baltimore is in a good place wrt water quality, but that doesn’t happen or continue without sustained effort. It’s taken a concerted effort to improve Chesapeake watershed quality. You can look at cities like Seattle where inadequate infrastructure has caused some big ecological disasters over the past decade. The answer imo is to have a great governor (looking at you, Wes Moore) who can help improve things so less of the budget for public works falls on working class taxpayers rather than wealthy businesses. The city government alone can’t fix things.

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malakamanforyou t1_ja0750d wrote

The city government is the cause for the high water bills. They are mismanaged, inept, and negligent. Baltimore county uses the same infrastructure that Baltimore city uses and their water bill is 20% or less than ours. The city imposes a storm water management fee and yet can’t even process the sewage that is pumped directly into the sewage processing facilities. And if you were to open your eyes and read the reports of why, you will see it’s the management, or lack there of, that causes it. The best possible way to lower our water bills is to take it away from city control

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wave-garden t1_ja0d4q7 wrote

City infrastructure is very old, and much of it needs to be replaced. Because the city has an insufficient tax base, it can’t afford most of this work and needs to keep applying bandaid fixes because it can’t afford to deal with the root cause. It’s an unhelpful comparison to equate Baltimore city and county because of the many other differences, such as higher population density, lower median income, greater difficulty in establishing work areas due to traffic volumes, extent of paved/built area, occupational hazards like lead and asbestos being far more common in the city, etc. Sure, mismanagement plays a role, but it’s unhelpful to attribute everything to that.

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malakamanforyou t1_ja18527 wrote

The only county/city to lose people from one census to the next in the entire dc to Boston area was Baltimore city. The decades of shit leadership and shit policies are creating this mess.

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