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Water Bill Assistance Programs Leave Out Deserving Customers
Analysis of customer assistance programs at the nation’s largest water utility companies finds that many in-need customers are excluded.
A report released today by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center (EPIC) finds that customer assistance programs offered by large water utilities to help low-income customers pay their water bills are poorly designed and leave out deserving customers.
The report, H2Affordability: How Water Bill Assistance Programs Miss the Mark, evaluated assistance programs offered by 20 of the largest water utilities and found that a fifth did not offer any type of assistance program and those that did offer assistance, failed to meet the needs of their community.
In Brief
Maryland’s Legislature recently considered, but did not have time to pass, SB0737 the Comprehensive Conservation Finance Act after it was developed collaboratively with both conservation nonprofit and private capital groups.
The bill tweaks a number of regulations concerning conservation programs to crowd-in private capital for a greater quantity and diversity of conservation projects for the Chesapeake Bay.
More broadly, it spurs discussion about incentives for land aggregation vehicles and capacity building in the conservation finance ecosystem.
(Courtesy the Conservation Fund.) From idea to impetus to investment, Maryland s bill aims for impact.
A Bill to Bring Private Capital to Public-Private
David Ekstrom Ames has reached an innovative agreement with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources that allows investment in conservation practices on farms to improve water quality and help the city’s water pollution control facility meet future, more stringent nutrient reduction requirements. Ames is Iowa’s fourth community to sign such an agreement. Dubuque, Cedar Rapids, and Storm Lake reached similar agreements last year. Sand County Foundation, a national agricultural conservation nonprofit, worked closely with these municipalities and the Iowa DNR to develop a model agreement that incentivizes cities and farmers within the same watersheds to address water quality together.
The California gnatcatcher,
Polioptila californica, is a little gray bird. Males are identifiable by their black cap (absent in winter), females by the slight brownish tinge of their plumage. Distinguishing the California gnatcatcher from the fifteen other species of gnatcatcher is easy, the ornithologist Jonathan Atwood told me “if you’re a gnatcatcher freak.” All the others are little gray birds, too.
Scientists have divided
Polioptila californica into several subspecies. The northernmost of these, the coastal California gnatcatcher (
Polioptila californica californica) lives along the western coast of the Baja Peninsula, from El Rosario, Mexico, north to Long Beach a range that includes some of the choicest undeveloped real estate in southern California. When the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service listed the subspecies as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1993, the region’s ranchers and developers were furious. The listing would cost them more than $900 mill