The seemingly endless crisis of running Baltimore’s water and wastewater system came into focus again today when the Board of Estimates reauthorized two contracts.

Itineris NA will continue to supply technicians – many of them coming from Atlanta, Ga., and staying in city-paid lodging – to handle the high-tech UMAX water billing system.

And critical operations at the Back River Wastewater Treatment Plant will remain outsourced in the hands of certified operators from a Harford County outfit called Professional Startup & Operating Services (Prostart).

The cost of these two vendors, filling blue-collar jobs once performed by Department of Public Works employees, has soared to $75 million due to extensions and augmentations.

For example, back in 2014, the city contracted with Itineris to supply $8 million worth of staffing. By 2022, the cost had grown to $41 million. And today the board upped that amount to $53 million.

Additionally, $10.2 million more was handed today to Prostart (for a total of $22 million) to supply operators and assign troubleshooters to maintain pumps, grit removers, blowers and other equipment in the headworks and denitrification complex.

And that’s not all. The city agreed last February to pay a Colorado company $50 million to staff the biosolids division at Back River, with the possibility that manpower costs could eventually double to $100 million.

Rising Tide

In short, tens of millions of dollars are being paid annually to private companies to help out DPW’s 1,600 water and wastewater employees, many of whom are without proper training and are not certified to perform skilled work.

Along with the capital expenditures needed to meet a 2002 EPA sewage consent decree, the cost of outsourcing work helps explain why residential water bills will increase by an average of 10% next month, followed by 9% jumps in July 2025 and July 2026.

Today the spending board’s newest member, City Council President Zeke Cohen, urged DPW to better train its staff and develop in-house programs so that employees can be certified to run the equipment at Back River.

“There is nothing more important than investment in our people. They are the critical infrastructure,” he said. “Whatever got us to the point that we do not have the internal capacity to be able to run our own shop, we got to fix it.”

“There is nothing more important than investment in our people” – Council President Zeke Cohen.

While not disagreeing with this assessment, Mayor Brandon Scott insisted he’d been hobbled by decisions made by predecessors.

“Anytime I hear the word Back River, I think about the sins of our forefathers,” he said. “About the disinvestment and all the things the comptroller and I had to deal with a few years ago. And how important it is that in that very short period of time, we have the plant putting out its best effluent numbers ever.”

“We have to work systematically to build back to the point where we have that extremely qualified and certified in-house staff that we know is the ultimate goal we want to get to.”

From there, plant manager Michael Hallmen took over.

He cited Covid, supply-chain disruptions, staff retirements and, once again, years of disinvestment as the reasons why Maryland officials temporarily took over the plant in 2022 to stop partly treated sewage from pouring into Back River and the Chesapeake Bay.

According to one critic, an opposite scenario actually took place. “The real story is that Back River was stripped of knowledgeable people,” the former employee said.

“Honestly, the industry isn’t that sexy to the young folks,” Hallmen lamented today. “So how do we rebrand ourselves?”

“Whether it’s cool or not, it’s pretty high paying, and it’s stable and it’s union,” Cohen replied. “I think it’s absolutely mission critical that we are not outsourcing a majority of this really important work,” he added, indicating that he will be revisiting the issue in the future.

NOTE: See The Brew’s back stories – Fresh Water, Foul Sewage – on DPW, Back River and related issues.