We offer twelve proposals to make tap water service in the United States more excellent, open, and equitable, following the framework outlined in Chapter 8. The first set of reforms relate to improving the excellence of tap water service in the United States. They include consolidation of America’s 50,000 water systems, improvement to drinking water regulation, improvement to tap water aesthetics, increased investment in infrastructure, and increased investment in human capital in the water industry. Our next set of proposals deal with making drinking water services more open. They include the development of water system report cards, increasing the visibility and public nature of water infrastructure, and improving outreach to citizen-consumers. Our final set of reforms deals with equity. These reforms include making water services universal in the United States, conducting distributional analyses when making and implementing environmental rules, expanding the regulatory role of public utilities commissions, and embedding equity in the administration of water services.

This chapter reverses the vicious cycle from previous chapters into a virtuous cycle of trust and government excellence. Excellent and responsive government agencies foster trusting citizen-consumers who use, advocate for, and support public services. Citizen-consumers who consume public services instead of exiting to commercial alternatives are more likely to support paying for further improvements to public services. Specifically, tap water drinkers are more likely than bottled water drinkers to support paying increased water rates to fund water infrastructure improvements. We then show how the citizen exercise of voice pushes public officials to provide higher-quality services. Although governments are not well suited to respond to citizen-consumer exit, they are designed to respond to the use of voice. Increased political participation raises the possibility of punishment for poor service delivery, incentivizing officials to keep service quality high. We find that increased electoral turnout is associated with decreases in water quality violations. Reframing the relationship between trust and public services as a virtuous cycle allows us to imagine a better way forward.

Basic services – the mundane but essential necessities of daily life – hold the promise of redeeming and strengthening American democracy. The burgeoning crisis of legitimacy besetting democratic governments across the globe has emerged in large part because many citizens no longer trust authorities to secure their basic needs. Americans’ experiences with and observations of failing basic services shape their behaviors as citizens and consumers, contributing to a cycle of distrust and government failure. Breaking and reversing this vicious cycle begins with sound public administration at every level of government. Government leaders who commit to excellence, openness, and equity in basic services can spark a new, virtuous trust-building cycle. Rigorous evaluation should accompany basic service implementation to ensure excellence and build performative trust. To establish moral trust, the agencies responsible for basic services must treat people respectfully and honestly, lavishly share information, and actively engage with the communities that they serve. Rebuilding democratic governance begins with literally rebuilding the basic infrastructure that sustains life.

This chapter advances a theory of the citizen-consumer that connects the quality of basic services to trust in government, trust in government to consumer behavior, consumer behavior to citizen political participation, and citizen political participation back to the quality of basic services. When basic services are sound, citizens trust the institutions of government; when basic services fail, citizens distrust those same institutions. People who trust government rely on public services, whereas those who distrust government opt instead for more expensive commercial alternatives. This distrust premium is pure profit to government’s commercial competitors and is paid disproportionately by the politically marginalized. Consumers who use public services have a strong interest in safeguarding quality, so they are politically active citizens, demanding high-quality public services. Consumers who abandon public services in favor of commercial firms withdraw from political life. These distrustful, disengaged citizens demand little from government and oppose public investments. Starved of resources and attention, governments’ service quality declines and a vicious cycle of distrust ensues.

The choices Americans make about the water that they drink reveal deeper lessons about civic life. Consumers’ spending choices reflect, in part, their identities as citizens, and citizens’ political decisions reflect their assessments of value as consumers. When government produces or regulates a basic service, the citizen-consumer’s choice between the public provider and a private, commercial firm reflects, in part, her trust in the institutions of government. Despite America’s widely available, highly reliable, high-quality tap water, the US commercial bottled water industry has exploded over the past two decades. This skyrocketing growth comes at a time of declining trust in American government. When tap water failures occur, citizen-consumers abandon utilities in favor of commercial water, and the most distrustful and politically marginalized people are most likely to opt for bottled water. Thus, distrust of government and consumption of bottled water are most pronounced among the poor and racial/ethnic minority communities. Commercial drinking water firms capitalize on this distrust with targeted marketing and growth strategies.

High-profile water contamination crises like the one in Flint, Michigan, shake confidence in US water systems. This chapter examines the links between tap water failure, reduced trust in utilities and government, and increased demand for commercial water. We show that negative experiences with basic service quality erode overall trust in government and increase demand for private alternatives. Analyses of data from three independent national surveys demonstrate that individuals who experience problems with their local water such as dirty, bad-tasting, or low-pressure water service also report lower trust in local, state, and federal government. The relationship between water service quality and trust in government persists after controlling for party identification, race, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. We also find that tap water failure correlates with increased demand for commercial water sold from water kiosks, privately owned commercial water vendors. Taken together, these findings suggest that basic service failure erodes performative trust in government and increases demand for commercial drinking water.