As much as $35 billion per year would be made available for Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act water infrastructure programs under new water trust fund legislation introduced in the House of Representatives on May 24. The funding would be generated by tax code changes requiring U.S. corporations to pay taxes on overseas income.
Sponsored by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), the “Water Affordability, Transparency, Equity and Reliability (WATER) Act” (H.R. 5313) would establish a water trust fund that would collect these newly imposed tax revenues. The trust fund would then distribute the funds – up to nearly $35 billion per year – by formula to a variety of water and wastewater infrastructure programs. The Drinking Water and Clean Water State Revolving Funds (SRFs) would receive the vast majority of the funding – 44.5 percent and 45 percent of the trust fund’s annual distributions, respectively.
Other sections of the bill would mandate new EPA studies on water affordability, “discriminatory practices of water and sewer service providers,” and water service regionalization. The bill would also make several operational changes to the DWSRF program, such as excluding privately owned or operated drinking water systems that serve more than 10,000 people from funding eligibility and by boosting to 50 percent the amount of a state’s yearly DWSRF allotment that may be used for subsidies for disadvantaged communities.
H.R. 5303 has attracted seven Democratic cosponsors, but appears unlikely to gain traction in the House of Representatives. A Senate committee recently approved a different proposal for a water infrastructure trust fund that would be financed by a voluntary fee paid by consumer goods manufacturers, and that legislation is expected to go before the full Senate this summer.