Production and distribution of City Club forums and ideastream public media are made possible by PNC and the United Black, fond of greater Cleveland, Inc.. Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, December 15th.

And I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here.

And pleased to introduce our speaker, Dr. Manuel Teodoro.

The Robert F. and Sylvia T. Wagner, distinguished professor at La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

Dr. Teodoro is a professor and author of his newest book, Prophets of Distrust, which explains why so many Americans opt for expensive, environmentally destructive water bottles or bottled water rather than cheaper, more rigorously regulated water straight from the tap.

But what if there was a link between the choices people make about drinking water and a deeper lesson about trust in government and civic life?

Today, we will learn more about why rebuilding confidence in American democracy starts with literally rebuilding the basic public utilities infrastructure that sustains life.

Dr. Teodoro has served on numerous panels state governments, UNICEF and the World Health Organization and the American Water Works Association.

Dozens of local governments have tapped his expertize on public policy, water regulation and management, as well as addressing citizen distrust in government.

If you have a question for our speaker, you can text it at 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And our city club staff will try their best to work it into the second half of the program.

Members and Friends of the City Club of Cleveland please join me in welcoming Dr. Teodoro so much.

Thanks so much, Cynthia, and thank you for that introduction and for inviting me.

It is an honor to be part of this distinguished series at the City Club.

It is it is so nice of you to join me on this beautiful day.

We don't know how many more days like this we're going to get here in the Great Lakes region.

So I appreciate that you've chosen to spend that time with me.

I also want to thank you for providing me with a glass of Cleveland tap water.

You know, thank you.

It's it's always a little embarrassing.

It's embarrassing when I come to give a talk about the trouble with with bottled water and why we should trust in the tap.

And then I come up onto the stage and there's a bottle of Dasani waiting for me next to the lectern.

And the people are so nice trying to provide it, but it's awkward.

I It is also, you know, it says something that in addition to being willing to spend your time with me in this room on a beautiful, a beautiful day, you know, you are my kind of people, right?

You're the kind of people who would spend an hour of your day listening to a talk about bottled water and democracy, which means that you're curious, you're smart, you're a little bit nerdy, you're strikingly attractive.

So in all of these ways, you're my kind of people.

So as Cynthia suggested today, I'm going to talk about the water that Americans drink and what consumer choices about drinking water.

Tell us about people's relationship with government.

The core of my remarks today come from a book that I wrote.

You just heard about it.

So I wrote with with Samantha, sulky at the University of Iowa and David Switzer at the University of Missouri.

The whole project has a very Midwestern accent.

The book was published a little over a year ago, and we tried to pull off a difficult trick here.

We're trying to write a theoretically sophisticated, empirically rigorous book that would appeal to academics and satisfy their needs, but also one that would would appeal to people who aren't professors but care about water, care about democracy, and might actually read something like this.

And a year after publication came out just a little over a year ago, I think we mostly got it.

The latest published review we've been reviewed a few times, the latest published review of this book declared that every water utility leader and water user should have this book.

So that was gratifying.

It also said that it was at times, Egghead.

It.

Which, you know, tough but but but fair.

Overall, we have been delighted at the reception that we've received from this book and more importantly, the conversations that it's inspired in communities across the country.

I hope to continue that conversation today.

Now, I'm not going to try to convey the whole book in the time I have with you today.

It's it's 300 pages long.

It's got a lot of charts, tables, a lot of statistics, maps and so on.

Instead, I'm going to give you our core argument, highlight a few findings and talk about what it all means for places like Cleveland and Cuyahoga County and similar communities across the country.

So those preliminaries aside, let's get started.

One level, this talk is about water.

It's very clearly about water, but it's also about commercial firms that sell water.

And at a deeper level, it's about the relationship between citizens and the states.

It's about democracy.

It's about the fact that people are both citizens and consumers and their identities as citizens shape their behavior as consumers.

It's about the fundamental principles of government and the crisis of faith that democracies are experiencing not just in the United States, but around the world.

Now, this project, the project that set us down this path, was really motivated by a quiet, almost imperceptible explosion of the commercial drinking water industry.

In some ways, my talk today is about the extraordinary things that we sometimes fail to notice because they seem so ordinary, like bottled water.

30 years ago, bottled water was a novelty.

The bottled water industry has grown spectacularly over the last 25 years.

According to the International Bottled Water Association, Americans bought 5.2 billion gallons of unflavored, non-carbonated drinking water back in 2001 that generated about $7 billion in revenue nationwide.

Today, over the next 20 years, the bottled water industry tripled to more than 15 billion gallons, and that translated into more than $40 billion in retail sales last year.

This year, Americans will spend nearly $50 billion on bottled water.

That's an average of $25 for each month for every household in the United States.

To give you a sense of scale, that is about half of the total water utility revenue across the entire country.

There's another way to think of it is that the bipartisan infrastructure law that Congress passed a couple of years ago allocated $11 billion a year over five years for drinking water infrastructure.

But over that same period of time, Americans are going to spend more than four times that much money on plastic bottles of water.

The last 25 years have also seen a rapid proliferation of drinking water kiosks, water kiosks or private automated vending machines.

They dispense drinking water in exchange for payment.

You put some money in, maybe you swipe a credit card and you get water.

Usually costs somewhere between 20 to $0.35 a gallon.

And those kiosks are located within business.

Your businesses, you often see them at big box stores or supermarkets or they're freestanding in the southern part of the United States where things don't freeze quite as much.

They're freestanding like like the ones that the folks in the room are seeing on the screen.

When I moved to Texas about ten years ago, a little over ten years ago, I had never seen these kiosks before.

I had no idea what they were.

And I saw them all over the place.

What the heck are these things?

So one of the gifts of moving to a new place is that you notice the things that locals see as ordinary, and you start asking questions like, Why is this here?

What is this thing?

What do I make of it?

One of my then graduate students, Samantha, Zaki and I, set out to figure out what these kiosks were all about.

And Sam developed a way to identify and ground truth the locations of these kiosks using Google Street View is really quite ingenious.

She and a platoon of research assistants went about and collected spatial location data on every freestanding drinking water kiosk in the United States.

And we found thousands and thousands of them, and they're common.

Now, these these kinds of kiosks, these vending machines out on the streets are quite common in the developing world, where tap water is unreliable and often unsafe.

And indeed, we see lots of kiosks in those pockets of the United States where tap water quality is poor.

But we also found them in major American cities like Denver, Atlanta, Phenix, San Antonio, Los Angeles and Houston.

These are cities with modern, professionally managed drinking water utilities with excellent safety records.

We also quickly realized that those kiosks, they're not randomly distributed across the city and they don't correlate with population density.

No, they're clustered in particular areas.

I'm going to come back to that in just a few minutes.

But the point is that these kiosks are proliferating and they're proliferating in ways that are puzzling.

Now, that kind of growth would be remarkable for any industry, but the rise of commercial drinking water is particularly striking because most Americans, most Americans have access to a more carefully regulated, often qualitatively superior, and always far less expensive alternative in tap water.

Kiosk water typically priced about $0.30 a gallon.

Case of Dasani or Ice Mountain or the generic Wal-Mart stuff works out to about, you know, somewhere between a dollar and a dollar 50 a gallon if you buy it by the case.

There are of course, there are some luxury brands, so-called luxury brands of drinking water that will absurdly cost hundreds of dollars a gallon.

But that's not where most of the water sales are.

Most of the water's bottled water consumed is rolling out of places like Costco and Walmart and Target.

In cases under labels like Great Value and Dasani and Ice Mountain.

By comparison, a gallon of tap water in Cleveland averages about $0.01.

Now, in fairness, if you add in the price of sewer service, that that price does go up considerably all the way up to $0.02.

So you get your sewer service from from the excellent Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District sponsoring this series.

So thank you for that.

Now, that is a heck of a deal compared to the alternatives.

And yet a vast and growing body of consumer research finds that, paradoxically, bottled water consumption in the United States is inversely correlated with income.

In other words, even though this this product bottled water, is vastly more expensive.

Low income folks are much more likely to consume bottled water.

Wealthier folks are much more likely to drink tap water.

Middle class and affluent people drink tap water.

Remember how I said a few minutes ago that that that kiosks are not randomly distributed?

Well, it turns out they're clustered in particular areas.

And we see this in city after city.

These commercial vending machines are overwhelmingly located in poorer neighborhoods.

We see hardly any of them in middle class to wealthier neighborhoods.

The other remarkable thing about commercial water demand is a stark racial and ethnic divide in drinking water behavior in the United States.

There's a raft of research that shows that black and Hispanic Americans are far more likely than whites to drink bottled water.

Even in cities and in neighborhoods, kids or black, white, Hispanic families all live next to each other.

The black and Hispanic consumers are far more likely to drink bottled water, even when all of those families get their water from the same utility.

And that all gets even stranger when you think about actual drinking water quality, tap water quality in the United States is regulated by state and federal agencies under something called the Safe Drinking Water Act.

One reason that we know so much about the tap water quality and we know about it when tap water quality fails, is the Safe Drinking Water Act requires public reporting, so scholars like me find out about it.

Journalists find out about it.

The commercial water industry, by contrast, is very lightly regulated.

Bottled water production is subject to inspection by the FDA, but there are no federal public reporting requirements.

Many states have reporting requirements for bottled water quality, but they're usually required to take quality samples something like once a year, whereas tap water's several times a day.

We're talking about a very different kind of regulatory regime.

Now, multiple studies have found that when tested, bottled water often fails to meet safe drinking Water Act standards at roughly the same rate as tap water fails to meet safe drinking water standards.

And bottled water has much higher levels of microplastics and none of that is.

And that's to say nothing about the environmental impact of bottled water, the bottles themselves, the cost, the carbon footprint of moving all of those bottles around in trucks, water kiosks are virtually unregulated in the United States.

So what's going on here?

What causes people to buy this environmentally destructive commercial water of dubious quality rather than environmentally sustainable, more rigorously regulated tap water?

What explains this meteoric growth of the commercial water industry in a country where most people has indoor plumbing?

And why does this expensive product flourish in places where people are poor?

And why do we see these stark racial and ethnic divides?

Well, we think that the answer lies in another long term trend.

The commercial water industry's remarkable rise has come at a time of declining trust in American institutions and declining trust in government, specifically, according to the Pew Research Center.

The share of Americans who trust the government to do what's right all or most of the time fell from 49% in 2000.

One to a little under 20% today.

And that is an astonishing and unprecedented 30 point drop over the last 20 years.

It is the lowest in the 65 years that Pew has been measuring trust in government.

We've got data going back a long, long time and we're at an all time low.

So bottled water and trust in government run in opposite directions.

And there are long term trends, but with an eerily similar average trend.

Bottled water consumption has grown by an average of 5 to 6% annually, and trust in government has fallen by 5 to 6% annually.

Core to our argument and prophets of distrust is that these two trends we don't think are coincidental.

We don't think they're inevitable.

The overarching theme in our book is that these two trends tell us something about the relationship between citizens and government in the 19th and 20th century, particularly the early part of the 20th century, American water utilities earned reputations for delivering reliable potable drinking water, and the rise of modern drinking water and sanitary sewer systems in the United States eliminated waterborne diseases and so improved health and economic prosperity across the country with either wood, concrete and chlorine.

These water and sewer systems transformed our cities from squalor to prosperity, and politicians built the modern American party system.

At the same time, they were building these systems far more than utilitarian.

Public water supplies are testaments to civic achievement, and they were celebrated as such.

They tend to reflect not just the quality of water, but also the quality of our civic institutions across the country.

Treatment plants, water towers, reservoirs and fountains built in the late 19th and early 20th century were not just functional, they were monumental.

During this period of explosion of drinking water systems in cities and towns everywhere, water treatment plants were monuments to the social value of water and to the genius of the state.

Water infrastructure improved life immediately and tangibly.

When you've been living with a hand pump on the street corner or the backyard, potable water in your house and a flush toilet are miracles.

Those systems made people's lives better, tangibly, immediately.

Drinking water, of course, is the most basic of basic services.

One of the ironic privileges of modernity is that it's easy to forget just how critical these systems are.

The water that flows from the tap forms the most intimate relationship between people and government.

We're talking about a government service that comes directly into your house.

We cook with it.

We immerse our children in it.

We take it into our bodies.

This is a government service that people ingest.

There is no more intimate relationship between government and a people than tap water.

Now, a central tenet, arguably the central tenet of Democratic theory, is that the legitimacy of any government rests on its ability to provide for its people's basic needs.

That is not a new idea.

It's right there in the Declaration of Independence and in the opening words, it is difficult to imagine any government anywhere maintaining its legitimacy without providing water for its people.

And the rise of commercial drinking water implies that a significant share of Americans believe that that water, that bottled water is superior to the water that flows from their taps.

Economists call tap that kind of distrust to distrust driven consumption.

Defensive spending.

That's the term defense of spending.

It's the idea that you spend on an expensive private product out of fear that the less expensive public product, collective product is bad for you.

Defensive spending accounts for much of the commercial drinking water industry's growth.

Bottled waters growth is in fact deeply rooted in distrust of tap water.

Distrust of water utilities is central to the business model of the commercial drinking water firms.

And I don't want you to take my word for it.

It's an advertisement.

For those of you who are not seeing the screen, I've got an advertisement for a drinking water kiosk.

And the appeal to fear is right there on the sign on the kiosk, it says, Your tap water can hang out in some pretty seedy joints with a big old rusty pipe, which ironically is actually not a drinking water pipe.

But there it is.

It's a rusty old pipe that's up from a from a water kiosk.

Now, the company that operates that kiosk is called Primo.

You've probably seen their kiosks.

They also have a delivery service.

Well, Primo filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission told its investors that and I'm going to quote directly from their SEC filings, quote, We intend to capture new customers as we capitalize on favorable consumer trends across our addressable markets, including concerns about focus and focus on health and wellness and concerns about deteriorating municipal water quality.

Now that filing goes on to identify municipal utilities as the company's main competitors.

Ironically, later on in the same filing, when identifying threats to the business, they also mention that one of the threats to their business is deteriorating municipal water quality.

Now, why is that?

Because that's where they get their water.

Which brings us back to trust in government and the heart of our book.

Citizens are also consumers, and consumers are mostly citizens.

A large majority of Americans get their water utility service from a local government, and all of them get their utility service from a utility that is regulated by government.

So to trust tap water is to trust the government.

To distrust tap water is to distrust the government and to distrust government is to distrust tap water as well.

See, trust or distrust has huge implications for these systems.

In a nutshell, what we think is happening is something like a vicious cycle of distrust driven by failures in basic service.

Here's how it works.

It starts with some kind of a basic service failure.

Those failures could be real or merely perceived.

They can be immediate or observed from a distance.

The failure can affect me personally, or it can affect people like me who live somewhere else.

That failure erodes trust in government, not only in the service, but in the whole suite of institutions that are responsible for that service.

That prompts a what we call a voice or exit decision.

When they're dissatisfied with government products or services, people can either use their voice.

They can voice their displeasure to government and its representatives, or they can exit for commercial alternatives.

The key thing here is that if you don't trust the government, exit is the only rational choice.

And I'll talk about that more in just a second here.

The commercial alternative might be more more expensive, but at least I think I'm getting a better product.

So with that exit for commercial alternatives, the most distrustful will stop using government services or reduce the use of government services and not spend defensively.

The side effect of that is that people who would who distrust government have little reason to participate in governance.

So we'll see a withdrawal from civic life among people who have exited from the public product.

With that review, reduced voice comes reduced incentives and reduced resources for excellent performance.

Politicians and public managers have fewer resources and less incentive to improve services, and that leads to more failure.

And the cycle continues when we apply that cycle to water.

The vicious cycle starts with a service failure.

Maybe it's something like a main break on my street.

Maybe it's a boil water notice.

Maybe it's just funny smelling water coming from my tap.

Or maybe it's something that happens far away.

Flint, Michigan.

Jackson, Mississippi.

I see these things happen far away and I react to it.

It reduces my trust in government, and that leads to that voice or that decision.

Should I appeal to authorities and ask them to do better or should I bail and buy bottled water instead?

Well, here's where trust comes in.

If I trust the institutions of government, I'm likely to use voice.

I'll call the utility, I'll contact a regulator, I'll contact an elected official, and I'll use my voice to demand better quality.

But the thing is, that can take a lot of time and the result could be uncertain.

And if I don't trust the institution to respond to my voice, it makes no sense for me to raise my voice.

Why would I appeal to someone who is incompetent or someone who is evil, who I believe hates me?

It makes no sense for me to use my voice so often.

An exit is the only rational answer if I don't trust the government.

Exit is always the best alternative and I'm better off.

I think buying bottled water.

So that means increased bottled water consumption.

And now I have less incentive to worry about tap water quality because I'm already paying handsomely for cases of Aquafina.

Increased bottled water consumption leads to less political participation.

I won't vote.

Won't write.

My members of Congress won't contact my regulator.

I won't engage with government at all.

In fact, I won't support efforts to improve water quality because I don't trust the institutions.

Why would I pay for support, a rate increase or a bond issuance or some kind of a public policy to improve the infrastructure?

When I think it's just going to an organization that's no good.

So that reduces the incentives and resources for better utility management, which feeds back into tap water failure.

Now in the book, we analyze a ton of data on consumer behavior, public opinion, water quality demographics to make the case that that's what happens at every stage.

You get all that in the book.

For now, I want to highlight just a couple of findings that we think are especially surprising or important.

First is the importance of the importance of esthetics.

Esthetics is the terms of the people in the drinking water sector used to describe how water tastes, how it looks, how it smells.

And it's important because a lot of utilities ignore esthetics or they downplay the importance of esthetics because they're interested principally in the safety of water.

But a lot of times, tap water can be perfectly safe for you, perfectly healthy to drink, but taste weird, smell weird, doesn't, you know, it leaves it leaves this sort of film or this calcification on your fixtures and makes it not quite trusted.

Well, part of our research included a lot of consumer behavior data and customer perception data.

And what we wanted to know is whether people's experiences with tap water related to their consumption of bottled water and trust in government.

And of course, that's what we found.

The likelihood of drinking tap we of of drinking bottled water increases from 22% for people who never experience problems up to 28% for people who have experienced problems like main breaks or low water pressure in their neighborhoods.

That esthetic piece.

Bottled water consumption jumps 14% for people who say their tap water tastes bad, tastes funny, and that shouldn't surprise us.

We've been we've evolved to use as our use our our taste buds in our and our noses to detect what is good and bad for us.

We also found that 10 to 25% drop off in trust in government among people who experience tap water problems.

So and that's after adjusting for partizanship and age and race and gender and so on.

To give you some context, the difference in trust in government between people who have experienced tap water problems and people who are not is roughly the same difference we see between Republicans and Democrats.

So you can think of it this way.

Bad tap water can make a Democrat feel the way a feel about government, the same way a Republican does.

It's that significant, a drop in trust in government.

Now, those numbers get even more startling when you look at race.

When we look at only black respondents, black, black folks in our in our data.

The first thing that will stand out to us is that the overall likelihood of drinking bottled water shoots way up compared to the national average is about 50%.

Almost 50% of black Americans drink bottled water as their primary source of drinking water.

But we also found a much bigger impact of water service problems among African-Americans.

The likelihood of drinking bottled water jumps by 8% for those who experience main breaks or low water pressure 12% if they experience dirty or cloudy water.

An astonishing 21% if they don't like the taste of their tap water.

We simply see similar things when we look at income, that kind of exit response to public service failure.

These are failures of public service and folks are responding with exit now in profits of distrust.

We argue that drinking water behavior in many ways reflects political alienation.

That's why we see different effects by income and race and ethnicity.

So highlight just one example from the book, the way we connect it to Political Alienation.

We looked at the relationship between voting rights protection and bottled water consumption.

What could those two possibly have to do with one another?

What could voting rights and civil rights protections have to do with bottled water?

Well, we have an interesting case to study in the state of North Carolina.

A little bit of background.

Back in 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act.

Section five of the Voting Rights Act provides voter protections that were aimed to protect of black voters and their right to vote in the Jim Crow South.

Now, in most cases, the Voting Rights Act, Voting Rights Act applied to entire states.

And so all state and local and federal elections in a given state, say, Alabama, Georgia, would all of those elections would be protected by Section five.

North Carolina was unique in that the Voting Rights Act applied not to the whole state, but rather to specific counties.

There are 100 counties in the Tar Heel State in 39 of them fell under Section five Voting Rights Act protection.

The other 61 did not.

Now, over time, other researchers have shown that that the counties that had Section five protection over time got significantly higher black voter participation, suggesting that those voting rights protections worked, that they resulted in higher, higher black voter turnout.

Now, we think that that political engagement or political alienation is also reflected in consumer behavior.

So we looked at bottled water consumption today based on which counties got voting rights protection back in the 1960s.

What we found was this remarkable correlation.

Counties that received across the state, counties that received voting Rights Act protection have lower bottled water sales today aggregated across the state that the difference amounts to something like $5 million in annual revenue to the bottled water industry.

That correlates startlingly well with whether folks had voting rights protections.

Now in the book, we do similar analyzes of Hispanics in the Southwest for rural populations in Appalachia.

And each case, we find links between a history of political alienation and consumer behavior.

Today, so commercial water firms have good reasons to rub raw the source of discontent and to make appeals to racial and ethnic minorities in their advertising.

The greatest profits of distrust then come not from the pampered and privileged, but from the poor and the powerless.

Another fascinating thing I want to highlight is what we call hyper ovia at the tap.

Hypertrophy is the technical term for farsightedness.

That's when you can see things that are farther away and things that are up close are harder to see for you.

So it's a vision with a human vision.

Well, one of our most startling findings in prophets of distrust is that water problems anywhere cause distrust everywhere in the book.

We have a whole bunch of space spatial econometrics, really fancy math.

But to show how it works, I think the best case to talk about is Providence, Rhode Island.

Like a lot of older cities, Providence has buildings with lead in their pipes.

Lead contamination in Providence, you may not have heard of it, but in some ways it's far worse than what Flint, Michigan, experienced.

And unlike Flint, where officials denied and obfuscated the problems with lead, the folks in Providence tackled the problem head on in 2014.

Providence This is a year and a half before the Flint water crisis.

Providence begins offering its customers free led testing.

They advertise, allowed to ask, told their customers will test your water for lead for free.

Now, initial participation was quite low.

That average about five customers a month signed up for free LED testing.

Then something unexpected happened in 2016.

LED testing requests in Providence leapt from an average of five per month to 25 per month.

So what happened?

Flint happened the Flint water crisis grabbed national headlines, and water contamination in Flint made Americans everywhere reconsider their relationship with their own tap water.

You see, distrust is contagious.

The effects of service failures transcend political borders.

And Providence and Flint are both cities with high poverty rates, high unemployment, large nonwhite population and shrinking populations.

So in addition to their own experiences, people spend defensively when they can identify with victims of government failures somewhere else.

Now, that's all troubling, but we don't think it's crazy.

It's the result of rational behavior by citizens and firms.

You don't trust government.

It's always rational to exit.

If you exit, instead of participating in politics, accountability declines, performance declines even further.

That's the bad news.

Good news is that vicious cycle can also be virtuous.

You can flip the cycle around and find the same empirical relationships, higher quality to higher trust.

Higher higher trust to decrease exit and an increased voice.

Greater resources and incentives for performance and better service overall.

So we argue that building, rebuilding and strengthening trust requires great service.

It starts with great service.

So we argue that building, rebuilding and strengthening trust requires excellence, openness and equity.

Now we closed the book with 12 specific reforms.

I proposed proposed reforms to fix drinking water in the United States.

I'm happy to talk about those people are interested, but I want to take my last few minutes to speak at a broad level about what we think needs to happen.

We think we've got to start with excellence.

We've got to deliver safe, healthy, great tasting tap water reliably, affordably and sustainably to every home in America.

No American should ever have to wonder whether the water flowing from her tap is safe.

Governments establish trust when water is truly excellent.

Attaining excellence then means investments in water, utilities and in the men and women who run these critical systems.

Now, there's often, sometimes a worry about the tension between quality and affordability.

And I've spent a lot of my career focused on the affordability of water and sewer services.

But the thing is, affordability starts with quality.

It doesn't matter how low your water bill is if you don't trust what comes out of the tap.

If the river is on fire, you haven't got affordable water, right?

You've got to invest in these systems.

And we've seen I just shown you the data.

When people don't trust the tap water, they're going to spend way more on on bottled water.

Next is openness.

We mean that utilities and governments must be fair, honest and transparent about everything that they do.

So we must lavishly share information.

At a minimum, it should be easy for customers to get information about source water quality, infrastructure conditions, rates and financial strength.

But to be more but even more than that, we've got to open wide and dredge deep the channels of communication between utilities and the customers that they serve.

And that's not easy because the people most distrustful of our water systems are least likely to engage with those systems.

So it is not enough to listen to citizen voices.

We have to listen for the voices that don't speak.

It's very difficult to do.

It's not about who shows up at hearings.

It's about who doesn't show up at hearings.

If I show up to a hearing to complain to my government, it suggests at some level that I trust that government to respond to me in a positive way.

So who isn't showing up to the meeting?

Who isn't emailing or calling or complaining?

Who isn't bringing forth their suggestions?

Well, I'll give you a hint.

Silence has a working class accent.

Finally, equity.

By equity, we mean that water service has to be excellent everywhere and for everyone.

Distrust, as we've seen, is contagious.

So failure anywhere causes distrust everywhere.

Your water might be excellent in Cleveland, by the way.

It is really is.

Your infrastructure might be in great shape.

Your operators might be top notch, your leadership responsive and responsible.

But when the subject of water comes up, people are going to talk about Flint, Michigan, Jackson, Mississippi.

They're not going to talk about Cleveland.

Even those places, though, those places are hundreds or thousands of miles away.

When we need to think about the nation's water as a whole.

We must embed distributional consequences and considerations into everything we do.

Now I want to wrap up with what all this means for water and for democracy writ large.

The American state was forged in large part with the infrastructure that sustains life.

The early 21st century that that protective state edifice is shaky.

Distrust at the tap contributes to a generalized distrust of our institutions, and the crisis of legitimacy that now be sets democratic governance.

Governance around the world happens in large part because so many citizens no longer trust governments to protect them and provide for their basic needs.

The rise of commercial drinking water is a symptom of a broader erosion of trust.

Bottled water.

Bottled water on a conference table in a city like Cleveland that has excellent tap water, says to those in attendance that the private commercial product is superior.

It's a subtle but persistent signal, signal and symbol.

A water kiosk on a street is a physical manifestation of that same distrust.

A reservoir or water tower.

Look, those of us in the Midwest know that the water tower is a sign of civilization, right?

Kiosk is isolated.

It's isolating.

It marks a landscape of alienation.

So the prophets of distrust that flow to commercial companies drag down the economy, they exploit the poor, they pollute the environment.

But more than all that, they erode our civic life.

But water can also reestablish trust in institutions.

At a moment when there's so much anger in the land, government must get the basics right.

Government must get the basics right.

Sound basic services.

Establish trust between citizens and the state.

And water is the most basic of all services.

Fixing water builds trust in democratic governance, even as it builds trust in the consumer product.

Fixing water is not like global warming.

It's not like Middle East peace.

It's not like curing cancer.

We know how to do this.

We can solve this problem.

Solving the problems of drinking water will demonstrate to the people of the United States and elsewhere that democracy still can fulfill the promise of a better life.

So those humble, ubiquitous pipes beneath our streets hold not only water, but the promise and the chance for visionary leaders to restore trust in American democracy.

Healthier water systems make a healthier republic.

Thank you very much.

All right.

We're about to begin the audience Q&A.

I'm Cynthia Connolly, director of programing here at the City Club.

Today we are joined by Dr. Manuel Teodoro, professor and author of Prophets of Distrust, a book that looks at why the public chooses bottled water over tap water.

And that link to citizen participation in democracy.

We welcome questions from everyone city club members, guests, students and those joining via our live stream at Citi Club dot org or live radio broadcast at 89 seven ideastream Public Media.

If you'd like to text a question for a speaker, please text it to 3305415794.

That's 3305415794.

And our city club staff will try their best to work it into the program.

May we have the first question, please?

Twofold question.

The first is a little catty.

One is, did they knowingly name Evian water as backwards being naive when they named it so many years ago?

And second, you use the word production of commercial water, and I guess I would take issue with that because I think it's more extraction of our publicly owned resource.

And if you might address the issue of that extraction and whether or not it should even be legal for private companies to extract our public water.

Yeah, too.

Good question.

Let me start with the name Evian.

I don't know.

But it is often noted that that could be could be what's happening.

And you're right, of course, nobody produces water.

Right.

That's above the humans pay grade.

It really is about extracting that water, as you said, and delivering it.

And so we make choices collectively about how we ought to do that.

You know, my coauthors and I debated at length and talked them back and forth among ourselves about what do we think about things like restricting water resources for for packaging in these kinds of systems?

And should there be things like laws against bottled water or taxes on bottled water to try to try to address that.

And after much discussion and careful consideration, we decided that a regulatory approach probably isn't right.

And there are some reasons for that one.

One is that bottled water, as I showed you, is predominantly a product consumed by the poor.

It's despite, you know, I think I think we tend to associate Fiji water, which you could talk more about Fiji water, but we tend to think of bottled water I think as a luxury good, but it's a good that's primarily consumed by the poor.

So as much as I would like folks to not drink so much of the stuff to restrict and or tax, that product really punishes people who are already intensely distrustful.

So I would like to see us address this phenomenon of of poor folks drinking bottled water by building trust in those institutions and make the market just die.

When people notice that, hey, I can get this product for one or $0.02 or I can pay a dollar 50 or $2 for the same product.

Hopefully, folks figure out that the smart thing is to go for the penny a penny a gallon.

But I share the concern and there are places like Fiji where we're mining aquifers to to provide this bottled water that's not sustainable.

So I'd like to see us get away from it, but I'm a little wary of using a very strong regulatory approach to do it.

Next question.

It's a sex question.

Do middle and upper class drink more tap water because they trust the government more?

Or can they just afford to install filters on their taps and fancy fridges, making their tap water more, quote, safe?

Yeah, that's a great question.

You know, this question about about home filtration systems, you can either get whole house filtration systems or this point of use like on your refrigerator or your sink and get these drinking water filtration systems.

And yes, those are more common in more affluent households.

However, the consumer research to date suggests that the reasons people use home filtration are different from the reasons people choose bottled water.

People tend to choose home filtration for esthetic purposes.

They don't like the taste of their water.

They think it tastes too much like chlorine is too much mineral taste in it.

And so that's why they choose filtration.

It's not out of a concern for safety, whereas people choose bottled water or kiosk water because they're concerned about health and safety effects.

Now, we think that might be changing of the data we used in the book.

The most recent data were from 2021.

We are increasingly seeing, at least anecdotally out in the market more and more the companies that sell filtration systems are now making appeals to protection against contaminants like p, phos or lead.

So we may see some changes in consumer behavior, but as at least at the time of the writing, the folks who use home filtration are mainly doing up to the flavor and the taste smell of water, not the safety.

I work in the energy sector.

I'm curious, have you seen government trust improve in any of these sectors, whether that be reliability on water or energy or what else there is?

I know there's a lot of distrust.

Have you seen any improvement in your studies?

It's a great question.

The short answer is no, other than we see the same the same kind of correlations we see here.

Where there's there's what?

There's one chapter in the book we call the happy chapter.

There is a chapter where where we discuss cases where people participate in politics, demand better and then get better service.

So we do see that happen.

I can't make cross-sector comparisons, but yeah, I think the energy sector is a nice, a nice way to compare and contrast.

The energy sector provides a really useful comparison to water because of the proportions of public and private.

So if you look at the United States, about 85% of Americans get their tap water service from some kind of a government city.

It's a county is a special district of some sort.

And about 15% get it from a private company.

It's almost exactly the opposite.

In energy, most Americans get their energy, whether it's gas or electricity from a private corporation is regulated by the government.

And then about a small minority of us get our electricity or gas from a government.

So we see very different business models here and there are useful lessons to be drawn there.

I think we do a much better job of for all those problems.

I think we do a much better job of regulating the energy sector than we do of the water sector.

So a lot of what I'm describing is as failures of government here with utilities.

They certainly are failures, but are just as much failures of the regulatory process and for reasons that we get into in other research I didn't talk about today, our regulatory institutions don't do a very good job of regulating local governments.

They do a much better job of regulating industry.

I think what percentage of Americans get their water from their own wells?

And is there an urban rural component to the phenomena that you've identified here?

Yeah, that's a great question.

Something like 10 to 15% of Americans get their primary drinking water from a, well, private.

Well, you know, one of the things that surprised me when I moved to Wisconsin is private wells are far more common in the upper Midwest than in other parts of the country.

Over a third of Wisconsinites get their water from a private well, which again surprised me.

I where I've lived before, overwhelmingly, it's coming from utilities.

When we've looked at trust in water, we don't see significant differences in utility water trust between urban and rural areas.

So if you live in a rural area, which would in our case, we're really talking about small towns, not truly rural, but small towns.

Hi, good afternoon.

My name is Jessica.

I'm from the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

So thank you for coming.

Thank you.

You mentioned about bottled water and how they don't pass some of the tests and the different issues that we have with that bottled water.

So my question is kind of twofold is, one, why aren't we hearing about that information, you know, and how do we get a hold of that information?

Because I you know, I'm not a bottled water drinker, obviously, but I have heard similar things that the water is actually worse than the tap water.

So how do you why aren't we hearing about it and how can we hear more about it?

Yeah, another great question.

I'll come with it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So so the first part of your question, why don't we hear about it?

Well, why don't we hear about bottled water problems?

The simple reason is the bottled water manufacturer is not required to tell us about their quality.

One of the reasons I mentioned this earlier in my talk, one of the reasons we know so much about the problems with tap water is we have this thing called the Safe Drinking Water Act in the 1996, the Safe Drinking Water Act was amended with a whole bunch of requirements that utilities provide a lot of public information whenever they have any kind of a problem with the tap water service.

So researchers like me grab those data, journalists go out and grab those data and it's your tap water is contaminated is great click bait right.

You're going to get a generate a lot of looks with that.

The bottled water industry is regulated by an entirely different regulatory regime.

They come under the FDA, they're testing requirements are far less rigorous.

And there is no federal reporting requirements.

So if they're failing, only a bureaucrat at the FDA will ever know it.

Now, there are state level agencies.

I don't know the law in Ohio, in Wisconsin and a number of other states, state there are state agencies that will test and publish bottled water quality.

But at least in Wisconsin, that testing and public reporting happens once a year.

Right?

So one time every year you get one sample of a bottle off of the shelf and then you can look at those data.

And that was the source of my claim that, you know, that they're failing water quality requirements at about the same rate as public utilities do.

And one of the things that isn't regulated is microplastics.

And all of the science on microplastics says shouldn't surprise us a lot higher microplastics and bottled water.

So that's a long way of saying we don't hear about those problems because no one's reported to to no one's required to report them.

So one very, very easy reform would be to start requiring bottled water retailers to provide the same kind of public information, that tap water quality that these tap water utilities do, at least put the give the public equal information and if public utilities are required to report their their quality once a year to their customers, you know, bottled water manufacturers ought to be as well.

Does your happy chapter include an example of a utility that was successful in increasing use of their water as opposed to bottled water?

And if not, what is in.

Your happy chapter?

Yeah.

So I'm going to.

I'm going to give a weasely answer to this question and the happy chapter, the case that we the each chapter includes at least one sort of specific case that motivates all the data analysis that follows.

Are happy.

You are happy.

Chapter is Columbia, Missouri, where one of my coauthors lives, where they had an old and failing drinking water facility and had a very acrimonious public debate over whether to invest in upgrading that plant.

And in the end, it's the public referendum to support reinvestment in the drinking water facility passed overwhelmingly.

And so we we perceive that as a vote of trust in the local government, because Columbia also has a very, very high rate of political participation.

And there was a lot of political participation around this law.

What we don't have right now, because that thing that that that process all happened about three years ago, is any data on whether that moved the needle on bottled water consumption.

So so that's a that's a big question.

I'll tell you the case where.

I'm specifically interested in them specifically interested in and it will be looking at the data very carefully is Jackson, Mississippi.

In Jackson, Mississippi, there's a place totally justified drinking that bottled water.

They take the microplastics over the other problems that they had in Jackson.

Now, Jackson is in the midst of a huge turnaround, partly federally, like actually huge federal funding there under the direction management of of an interim special.

And they're doing a lot of really aggressive and creative things to try to fix the water and sewer systems in Jackson.

I will be very interested and looking at bottled water sales in Jackson over the next couple of years as those improvements go into place.

One of the things been fascinating is that the leadership in Jackson has been leading their public messaging with bottled water.

They're explicitly saying to people, Look at what you're paying for bottled water.

We can now vouch for the quality of your tap water.

Please stop spending $100 a month on cases of bottled water.

Pay a penny a month to us and you get the same, same quality.

So that's a place that I hope will be a turn around in heck.

If you can do it in Jackson, you've got to be able to do it anywhere.

Dr. Theodore Tang, thank you for coming once again to Cleveland or talking to Cleveland once again.

You were our first speaker of our inaugural Cleveland Water Equity Task Force Affordability Seminar.

So thank you for that.

Those insights then and again today.

My question to you is, based on your understanding of what our landscape has been and knowing that our utility water utility here is an enterprise utility and who would you like to have seen in the room today to hear the message that you're talking about?

And what would you have liked them to hear?

Thank you.

Oh.

Gosh.

Well, first of all, thank you.

Unlike the first time I spoke to Cleveland.

Cleveland ers, is that what you call yourselves?

People from Cleveland, Cleveland Heights, Cleveland's up.

The first time was during the bad old days.

It was on Zoom because we couldn't travel to places.

So it's nice to actually be here in person.

Who?

Who would I like to have in the room?

I'd like this.

This might be a little bit of a surprising answer, maybe.

I'd like a really ambitious politician.

I want someone.

You know, there's this old saying that every senator in the United States capital looks in the mirror in the morning and sees the future president of the United States.

The same could probably be said of governors mansions.

What we need is visionary leadership, someone who recognizes that this is an issue that Americans care about.

And unlike those other things I mentioned, we can solve this one.

Thank you so much to Manny Teodoro for joining us at the City Club today.

Forms like this one are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club dot org.

Today's forum is part of our Sustainable Northeast Ohio series sponsored by the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District.

It is also part of our Authors and conversation series.

Thanks to Cuyahoga Arts and Culture and the Cuyahoga Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Thanks to all of our partners for their support.

We'd also like to welcome students from M.C.

Squared STEM High School in North Olmsted High School.

We would like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by the Northeastern Regional Sewer District.

Thank you all for being here today.

The city club will be off for the holiday break, but we will return on Friday, January 12th, with president and CEO of Cleveland Neighborhood Progress Tanya Menez, part of our local hero series.

She will discuss the challenges of equitable neighborhood revitalization and the future of the community development ecosystem and just announced on Monday, January 29th, we will welcome the amazing Reverend Naomi Tutu.

Race and gender justice and activist to discuss how we can create a brighter future for everyone in the fight for women's rights.

She will join us.

25 years after her father, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, spoke at the City Club.

You can learn more about these forums and others at City Club dot org.

And that brings us to the end of today's forum.

Thank you once again to Dr. Teodoro and thank you, members of Friends of the City Club.

I'm Cynthia Connelly and this forum is now adjourned.

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