Using Data to Prevent Water Shutoffs in Philadelphia

• January 17, 2023
• Public Health

“The right to water entitles everyone to have access to sufficient, safe, acceptable, physically accessible, and affordable water for personal and domestic use.” 

UN General Assembly and the Human Rights Council

As cities reexamine existing inequities and work to dismantle racist systems, one area ripe for innovation is fines and fees. The Data-Smart team has written about this work before, with a focus on the research that supports segmenting fines and “right-pricing” fees. And in the city of Philadelphia, local leaders have spent the last few years reviewing and reworking fines and fees across several agencies, including late fees in the library system and the pricing structure for phone calls in prison.

However, the pandemic really pushed this work into the utilities sphere. The United Nations has established that access to safe, clean, and affordable water is a human right, yet many local governments and municipal water departments will shut off water as punishment for failing to pay water bills. In Philadelphia, the city stopped this practice of cutting off water during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, a move fully endorsed by the city’s Department of Public Health, according to Julia Hinckley, the director of policy and deputy chief of staff to Mayor Jim Kenney.

The Philadelphia Water Department was concerned about public health during the pandemic, but also must balance this with its need to ensure that it receives enough revenue to maintain the city’s water infrastructure to provide clean, safe water for all.  The question of how the shutoffs policy impacts revenues is a complicated one the City is still examining.  The Mayor’s Office, which is home to GovLab PHL’s Philadelphia Behavioral Science Initiative, wanted to get into the data. 

All the city agencies embarked on discussions around changing its shutoff policies around a “shared goal to ensure that no one should be shut off because of an inability to pay” The work was bolstered by evidence from Chicago, where Mayor Lori Lightfoot campaigned on stopping water shutoffs; preliminary insights showed that doing this could be cost-neutral for Chicago. 

Philadelphia had already established programs to assist low-income residents with paying their water bills. The Tiered Assistance Program (TAP) adjusts individual water bills depending on the residents’ income (hence why it is “tiered”), and as long as folks are making payments regularly their back debts will be forgiven. However, according to Hinckley, it’s complicated to enroll in TAP since folks need to opt-in, and there are many eligible residents who aren’t a part of the program.

So, based on the lessons learned from TAP and the data from the COVID moratorium, the cross-departmental group began to craft a new assistance system for preventing shutoffs. First, the Water Department increased the dollar amount owed that would trigger a shutoff, from $150 to $1,000. Then, they “started to get really smart about how to identify households who should be exempt from shutoff because of inability to pay,” said Hinckley, “by looking at who is already participating in means tested assistance programming.” The team at city hall and the Office of Integrated Data for Evidence and Action (IDEA) already had data on low-income residents who were enrolled in programs like Medicaid or services offered through the homelessness system. City leaders determined that enrollment in these assistance programs should create eligibility for the new water shutoff protection policy.  

Thanks to the work of Hinckley and her colleagues in GovLabPHL and IDEA, the city has a strong foundation of data and data sharing. Data on Medicaid enrollment, involvement with homeless services, youth in the child welfare system, and prison data are all integrated. The city runs data matches to identify who is eligible for the exemption from shutoff monthly. Then, the Water Department goes through this data before enacting any shutoffs, to see who should be exempt.

According to Hinckley, “this dramatically increased who would actually be covered by this new protection.” Shutoffs resumed over the summer, in July 2022, so the city hall teams are currently analyzing the last few months of data. Matching with IDEA data is also helping examine the impacts of the shutoff policy for different racial groups.  For example, the Water Department doesn’t have race/ethnicity data but thanks to the integrated, inter-departmental data the joint team can see if there are inequities by race/ethnicity or if there are trends related to age (for example, seniors or young children in the homes). Traditionally, water shutoffs are paused during wintertime, which provides another opportunity to analyze and fine-tune the data and examine opportunities for future improvements to policy.

By April 2023, when the winter moratorium is over, the team will look at iterating and tweaking the new system as needed. The city is also thinking about an auto-enrollment option that would include more folks in TAP, so any low-income person who is automatically flagged as exempt from shutoffs could be enrolled in the assistance program and qualify for lower bills and forgiveness of arrears. “Folks could opt-out if they wanted to,” said Hinckley, “but this would put them right in the program without any extra burden.” Another piece of the puzzle is how to make sure the protections are available to all who need them even if, for example, they don’t qualify for federal assistance programs because of their immigration status; the team is hoping to find ways to extend the right to clean water to every single person in the city.

The basic human right to water was broadly supported by all city leadership, but it wasn’t until the team working on this could collect and use integrated data  that equitable solutions surfaced. Thanks to a strong city data culture and willingness to innovate, residents in Philadelphia are living safer lives.