Issues surrounding the supply of water to residents of Trinidad dominated the front pages of the country's three newspapers yesterday.
There was the fiery protest by the residents of the village of Granville in Cedros over the lack of water in their taps. And there was the warning by Kelvin Romain, the acting CEO of the Water and Sewerage Authority (WASA), that some 10,000 residents served by the Navet Reservoir in Valencia could face water curtailment.
The availability of potable water has been a frontburner issue in T&T for decades.
The main underlying causes of T&T's failure to ensure a reliable supply of water to its residents are the significant underinvestment in new infrastructure by administrations for decades and the pathetic inability of the utility to maintain the infrastructure it has in place.
These factors, according to the 2021 document 'Strategic Action Plan for water supply improvement to the population over the short to medium term', resulted "in several of the facilities operating significantly below capacity and subject to frequent breakdowns, and the existence of non-functional assets."
WASA has not built a new water treatment plant in years. Its booster stations, meant to ensure that water gets to houses on hills or at the end of pipelines, are in shambles and its pipelines are ageing and therefore prone to leakage.
In delivering the 2024 Budget speech last week, Minister of Finance Colm Imbert said Government was in the process of establishing WASA as a modern utility delivering efficient water and wastewater services to the population.
One aspect of its plan to transform WASA is a $1.05 billion capital investment programme for the utility over the next two years. That programme, which is meant to go a long way to address both WASA's maintenance issues and its infrastructure, will be partly funded by a US$80 million ($544 million) loan from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB).
The IDB loan will be used to refurbish and upgrade existing water treatment plants (WTP) at Guanapo, Navet and North Oropouche. It is estimated that the plant upgrades will improve the amount and reliability of water supplied to an estimated 477,433 customers. Also on the cards are new water treatment plants in Santa Cruz and Tobago.
In the Budget speech, Mr Imbert revealed that the Government's subvention to WASA between 2019 and 2023 amounted to $8.118 billion, which averages at $1.62 billion a year over the five-year period.
Importantly, Mr Imbert then added: "In the process, we expect the net deficit of WASA to be substantially narrowed following the completion of the WASA price review by the Regulated Industries Commission."
This is as clear a signal as possible that part of the Government's plan to turn WASA into a modern utility includes increasing water rates.
The fact is that WASA has not had a rate increase since 1993 and it is expected that if the population receives a better, more reliable water service, that it should be prepared to pay more for it.
But the majority of the population is not likely to abide with Government attempting to foist higher water rates on the public before a demonstrable improvement in the water supply.
Government must also ensure that short-term measures are put in place to alleviate the plight of communities such as Granville.