With Sacramento’s robust water infrastructure, why are homeless residents still dying of thirst? | Opinion
When a Sacramentan loses their home and is forced to live on the streets, they lose access to a safe and reliable water supply as well. Access to water is simply not an option. We can do better.
Currently, under the official water delivery program for people who live outside in Sacramento, the county contracts with Safer Alternatives through Networking & Education (SANE), a non-profit, to deliver water to the unhoused. SANE has one van and two full-time staff to cover every homeless encampment in the county and city on a rotating basis.
Everyday, two people load the van with pallets of plastic, one-gallon containers of water. Then they drive to the next camps in their rotation.
Opinion
Shilo Jama, the director of SANE, estimates that they reach each camp once every four to six weeks and give out six gallons of water per person at a time.
Jama says that they are not delivering meaningful amounts of water to drink, wash or prepare food. All they can do is try to prevent deaths from dehydration. When people call 311 in a heat event to beg for water, they are directed to this county program, where they are fit into the monthly rotation. The contract for this inadequate water delivery costs the county about $200,000 annually.
It would make a great deal more sense, however, for the city of Sacramento to use its wonderful engineered system to deliver water to people experiencing homelessness.
The existing water system reaches into every corner of the city — which is where people live, either indoors or outdoors. For the price point of $200,000 a year that the county now spends, the city could provide much better water services than six gallons of water in plastic jugs every four weeks. Providing water where people live would decrease unauthorized tapping into the water system, keeping costs down and the system safer for everyone.
It is nearly impossible for people who aren’t connected to water infrastructure to get enough water to use for hydration and basic hygiene. Water is heavy, it must be held in containers — and nothing else can substitute.
When water is not delivered to our unhoused neighbors, they must spend a great deal of their day acquiring water. When people need water so that they do not die in multi-day heat events, they will do anything they must to get water: One woman who spoke at a city advisory commission meeting said that when she turned the handle on a city water valve to fill her containers, the police cited her for utility vandalism and spilled out the water from her containers — twice.
But turning a valve is not the worst thing people will do to get water. When the alternative is to die of thirst in the heat, people will use any means to reach the water in our “public” system. Giving people safe and sanctioned ways to access water will prevent them from breaking into our delivery system.
Our current method offends my engineer’s soul. It is outrageous that humans are picking up, driving and delivering plastic gallon jugs of water when we have plumbing right now. We have mastered delivering clean, pressurized, on-demand water to our people.
That people are dying of thirst in a place with complete water infrastructure is a sign that we have failed at decency.
Two main things prevent us from using city water infrastructure to serve homeless residents: First, the city council has not directed the Department of Utilities to serve the thousands of people who do not have houses (there are over 9,000 individuals experiencing homelessness within Sacramento County).
The second issue is Proposition 218, passed by California voters in 1996, which restricts how local governments can spend fees such as water bills. Prop. 218 requires that someone must pay for any water that gets delivered in the city. The Department of Utilities is not allowed to use money that people pay for water to cover someone else’s water. But this is a solvable problem: The county could pay for the water bill using state and federal grant money. One of the non-profits that serve people experiencing homelessness could foot the bill. The cost of the water itself, delivered through the city’s system, would be very low: a few thousand dollars per year.
The reality is that people who don’t have houses still have human bodies that need water. I am certain that we can provide water to many more people more cheaply using existing infrastructure. We can give the gifts of modern infrastructure to all residents of Sacramento, whether they have a house with a water meter or not.
Megan Fidell is chair of the City of Sacramento’s Utility Rate-setting Advisory Commission.
