This is an opinion column.
I’ve got a plan that will save the Birmingham Water Works $69,000.
It’s easy. Hey water works: Just don’t spend it this time. Just stop.
Stop now. Pull your finger out of wherever it’s stuck and hold it high in the air. Check the wind, guys. Feel it. And don’t stroke that check.
As my colleague Joseph Bryant reported this week, the water works just voted to spend $69K on a survey to better understand how people feel about the agency. A survey, to help create a plan to improve their image.
A survey. That will cost enough to buy the average Alabama family groceries for the next five years.
A survey that will do nothing to solve the water works’ image problem. Because only a change in reality is gonna change the image. And $69,000 won’t put a dent in that reality.
The Birmingham Water Works does not need a survey to know how people feel. People – I hear from them all the time – just want to hope the water works will stop doing stupid, self-serving, tone deaf stuff. They want evidence that this board can learn to respect the public’s money, for once.
This is a system that consistently comes in last place – and it’s not even that close – on J.D. Power customer satisfaction surveys. It finally turned around and paid J.D. Power $37,500 membership fee – the posted starting salary of an Alabama State Trooper – to try to get a better grade.
Because image is everything. Geesh.
Yet this system raised rates every year in memory, since Bill Clinton was president at least. It has said it will continue to do so every year as part of its long term financial plan. It has frequently bungled billing, in the past locked customers out of their own accounts, and failed to understand why it is despised.
And that was long before people Over the Mountain began to complain that their water tastes like dirt. Or beets.
Don’t worry if your water tastes funny, the water works said. It’s completely safe. Trust us.
That ought to do it.
My goodness. They are worried about image? This is the utility that paid former Congressman Earl Hilliard more than $300,000 for federal lobbying over the last three years, that will pay two firms $360,000 this year to lobby the state Legislature, even though only one bill related to water authorities was introduced – to allow some public officials to serve on water and sewer authorities. It didn’t get far.
This from an agency with a full-time PR department, two outside PR firms, and a reputation funkier than beet water. And that’s pretty funky.
I mean, this board is being sued for more openness by one of its own members. It is a board that fights over what lawyers get paid and who gets contracts, a board that – remember this – lost $4.3 million in retirement funds in a Ponzi scheme.
It is an agency that has seen more indictments than reassurances. And what really changes?
It continues to raise rates. Every year. It continues to spend money, to pay lobbyists, lawyers and lackeys. And there is no sign, despite the millions spent, that this board ever thinks of meeting the needs of customers as a way – the way – to improve its image.
And that’s the problem. If the water works thought first about customers, it wouldn’t have an image problem in the first place.
John Archibald is a two-time Pulitzer winner.