For the first 15 years of his academic career, Manny Teodoro found it difficult to convince people that they should care about water. The Flint Water crisis in 2014, in which the Michigan town’s drinking water supply was contaminated by lead and dangerous bacteria, changed the game.
“I no longer have to explain to people that this stuff is important,” says Teodoro, an associate professor in the La Follette School of Public Affairs. “One of the great things about studying water as a social scientist is that water is universally important, and drinking water is the great unifier.”
Teodoro studies water from a public policy perspective and through an environmental justice lens—in particular, the public utilities that govern it and set the policies that affect the ways we access, pay for and use it.
The Wisconsin Idea is what drew him to Madison. The week after his first faculty recruitment visit, Teodoro was reading a book about the history of utility regulation, and came across the name of Charles Van Hise, the legendary UW-Madison geology professor turned university president who argued for the concept back in 1905.
“The Wisconsin Idea is a mission statement for my academic career,” he says. “Because this is exactly what I want to do.”
Wisconsin is the only state where every drinking water utility is regulated by the state’s Public Service Commission, creating an ocean of water-related data Teodoro can use to study multiple research questions: The ways in which municipal elections affect water quality and water rate-setting, or equity questions, like how capital reinvestment in pipes and water mains impacts water quality outcomes.
“Nobody's got 100 years of utility regulatory data like Wisconsin does,” says Teodoro. “It's so much fun to be able to just download datasets and analyze them and not have to call 500 different utilities to get the information that I need.”
Teodoro is loosely referring to one of his biggest policy goals--consolidating and reducing the vast number of water utilities in the United States. There are nearly 50,000 of them, spanning a wide range of sizes. And as you might expect, not all of them are especially effective or efficient in following guidelines laid down by the Clean Water Act of 1972 and Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.
“We need different governance institutions for water in the United States,” Teodoro argues. “What we've got right now is not sustainable.”
Teodoro’s latest project: Creating a nationwide system of rating report cards for municipal water and sewer utilities, giving politicians an easy metric to be able to claim credit when infrastructure and water quality improve under their watch (and voters an easy metric to boot them if quality declines).
“When politicians and the public think about infrastructure, they think about roads--I can look out my window and there's a road, I drive on it, it's visible to me,” says Teodoro. “But water is the thing that keeps us alive every day. The pipes, the reservoirs, the treatment plants, they're all out of sight. The effort behind the report cards for drinking water systems is to make the invisible, visible.”
He’s also building up his public persona to advance that idea. Earlier this year, Teodoro was tabbed as one of the tasting judges in a statewide contest to determine which water utility had the best-tasting water in Wisconsin (spoiler alert: It was Oak Creek). He meets regularly with water utility managers and often serves on national advisory panels tackling issues like taxing tap water and poor water quality in poor communities.
Next year, Teodoro’s second book is due out: “The Profits of Distrust,” a project coauthored with colleagues at the University of Iowa and University of Missouri that examines the parallel rise of the $50 billion commercial drinking water industry (think Klarbrunn and AquaFina) and decline of the public’s trust in governmental institutions.
“We argue that these two trends are not coincidental-- they're related to each other,” says Teodoro. “When people exit the tap water system in favor of this much more loosely regulated commercial water sector, they’re choosing a private corporation over the government that is theoretically accountable.”
Teodoro’s faculty position was made possible by a gift from former Wisconsin Senator Herb Kohl through the Kohl Initiative.