I'm surprised the rich American towns and cities experiencing pollution didn't pay for the extra sewage processing themselves. Is the problem so huge only the federal government has the budget to fix it?
Political parties of both colors have realized that if you take control of a public resource and then don't repair, maintain or upgrade it, it creates problems that are very lucrative for some company to solve.
American corruption is at a new peak. The big scary yellow signs just help ferry the wealth upwards.
Agreeing with moralestapia in that this isn't something to downvote. We're seeing this with water utilities, where outside companies are brought in under contract to solve water efficiency issues as droughts get worse. Cibola Arizona was recently a victim of Greenstone Resource Partners doing this to "solve" a water shortage in Phoenix. A water shortage the Arizona and California governments caused by not placing stricter water limits in place for agriculture and not fighting for better allotment for households.
What's worse is any maintenance or repair done by those companies is done to the existing standards with the expectation of continual failure of the same type to ensure continual work and guarantee the usefulness of current stockpiled inventory, instead of replacing problem infrastructure with improved versions that would theoretically be less failure prone and cost the overseers and thus the public less money. Short distance powerlines are a great example of the U.S. using standards that are a century old in order to create work, because if there are overhead powerlines somebody has to trim the branches that hang over the lines, somebody has to grow the trees that make new pylons, somebody has to buy the equipment to restring the lines when they go down, somebody has to manufacture the pole transformers, and so on.
