Plenty of water to go around, but how do we distribute it?

A couple of years ago, the Ma- honing Valley Sanitary District launched a marketing campaign to find new customers for its drinking water. The MVSD, which has been the source of drinking water for its member cities Youngstown and Niles for the past 75-plus years, has a lot more of the wet stuff than is being used. According to data released at the time, during the summer, the purification plant in Mineral Ridge can produce 60 million gallons a day. However, demand has been around 27 million. Three hundred thousand customers are served by Youngstown, Niles and the village of McDonald.

The MVSD has the ability to double the number of users, but the reality of the region is such that an additional 300,000 customers in the two cities and the village, and the suburban communities they serve, is a pipe dream.

Youngstown Mayor Jay Williams, with the backing of city council, is finalizing a proposal to sell 2.2 million gallons of water daily to Aqua Ohio. Council has approved the enabling legislation and the board of control, made up of the mayor and finance and law directors, will act on the measure by mid-June.

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has followed the water wars going back decades that Austintown, Boardman and Canfield, which encompass the ABC Water and Storm Water District, have cried foul and are exploring the possibility of suing Aqua Ohio. Why? Because officials in the townships contend that Aqua Ohio agreed in a letter in 2009 to sell water to ABC, but the plan being pursued by Youngstown and the Boardman-headquartered water distribution company states that neither would sell water in the other’s distribution areas in Mahoning County.

Youngstown supplies drinking water to Austintown and parts of Boardman and Canfield. Thus, Aqua Ohio would be prohibited from supplying to the ABC District.

To further exacerbate the problem, Youngs-town will sell the water to Aqua with a 10 percent surcharge, compared to the 40 percent surcharge paid by its suburban customers, including those in Mineral Ridge, Liberty and Girard.

The surcharge has long been a point of political contention, with trustees in Austintown and Boardman, in particular, accusing the city of price gouging.

Over the years, there have been all sorts of proposals to end the water wars, but it always comes down to this: Youngstown and Niles have the water; the others don’t.

While that argument had some merit in the heyday of the Mahoning Valley, when the steel mills were operating full bore, today’s reality is that the region’s population is shrinking, and Youngstown is losing more people than other communities. In other words, neither it nor Niles has the customer base to use even half of the drinking water that the MVSD can produce.

Valuable resource

No one can blame Mayor Williams for exploring all avenues, but it should be clear to all public officials that this region has a resource many parts of the country would die for — and in fact are dying because of drought and the lack of water.

We have long supported the claims by Youngstown and Niles that any talk of regionalizing the MVSD must take into consideration the investments made over the past seven decades and the revenue the communities get from selling drinking water. But, the mayors and councils in the two cities must also acknowledge that having all that water in Meander Reservoir is bad public policy.

The latest flap over the Youngstown-Aqua plan should be seen as an opportunity for government and community leaders in the region to begin a serious conversation about water.

It cannot be called at asset when most of it isn’t being used now — and there is little chance of most of it being used in the future.