The Milwaukee Water Works’ really bad proposal to gives incentive to companies  to waste water was approved by the Public Service Commission last week and, over the objections of the city, extended to suburban communities that buy water from the utility.

Yup, the city comes out with absolutely no net advantage with its new, screw-you-residential-ratepayer plan and avoids for at least another year dealing with the hard issue of excess capacity in its water system. Big water using ratepayers get an economic development rate discount; others get the bill for the city’s failure to deal with the issue.

A really, really bad aspect of this new discount is that the companies that get it don’t even have to show that new jobs they add have anything to do with the additional water that is going down the drain or with the rate break they are getting.

So much for Milwaukee city government trying to sell itself as “green.” Mayor Tom Barrett and the Common Council should be embarrassed about this one. Residential ratepayers and anyone who cares about the health of area waterways should be furious.

To qualify for the bad new discount, a new business must use 500,000 gallons of water per billing period, and an existing business must increase its water use per billing period from a baseline of at least 1 million gallons  to 2.5 million gallons, or by 50%, whichever is less.

A business seeking the discount must submit a water use and efficiency plan to the Water Works, and file an affidavit swearing that it would not increase water consumption without the encouragement of the economic development rate. (Emphasis added.) Enforcement of the plan? Water Works would be allowed to audit each recipient’s water use, but there is no mention of who would do the auditing. New staff? Doesn’t that cost money, requiring more revenue, requiring higher water rates? And if a company is caught cheating, it will have 90 days to stop. (“Really, officer? I was going a hundred miles over the limit? I promise I will slow down in three months.”)

The firm must create 25 jobs within 90 days of approval of the discount. There is no requirement that adding the jobs have anything to do with the additional water use or the water rate discount. There just needs to be 25 new jobs.

Let’s think about this one a little bit. Let’s say you are a big water-using-business planning to expand and add jobs. Wouldn’t you apply for the discount and wait until you know if you have gotten it before adding those jobs? It’s not a hard decision to make, since if you add them too soon, you won’t qualify for the discount! By waiting and adding the jobs later, you can get the discount that has nothing to do with the jobs you were going to add anyway. What a deal for the business! There is a downside, though, for the city: job creation may actually be put on hold until while the company waits for its free money to be confirmed.

And let’s say you are a new business that adds 600 jobs but only uses 400,000 gallons of water per billing period. What you get is — jack sh–! Too bad, buddy!

There are a few environmental requirements that must be met to qualify for the discount, but they are almost laughable. The Water Works must certify to the PSC that the additional consumption won’t hurt the water supply and that it will not increase water rates for other customers. If the latter is true — if the Water Works can lose revenue from one source without replacing it from another source — then it already is operating with a bloated budget and is overcharging customers and the PSC should re-examine the huge rate increases it just granted to the utility.

If  the Water Works must charge other customers more to recover what it loses by granting the discount, then it will either have to deny all discount applications or pass those costs on to other customers in the form of increased rates.

And how is the Water Works supposed to know the impacts of each business on the overall quality and health of the water system? Are cumulative impacts considered? It does not appear that they will be. So if each of 100 businesses receiving the discount has a negligible effect on Lake Michigan, but collectively they will destroy it, the collectively part of the equation will not be considered.

The Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, meanwhile, must certify that it can treat the increased wastewater without adversely affecting the operation of its plants or increasing charges to other customers. Given the flooding and overflows in recent years, how on earth could it possibly do that?

This is a crazy, bad plan. The Milwaukee Water Works how has the authority to implement the crazy, bad plan, but it is not required to do so. And it should not.