Dive Brief:
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The National League of Cities’ 2026 Municipal Infrastructure Conditions Report, released Friday, shows “a noticeable drop” in reported water and sewer conditions compared to 2022.
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A survey of public works directors and staff, city engineers and city managers from municipalities nationwide found that the officials’ ratings of their own water systems have dropped from 82% satisfactory in 2022 to 39% satisfactory in 2026, and 18% now rate their systems not satisfactory, up from none in 2022.
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Aging assets, rising construction costs, capacity and fiscal constraints, increasingly complex regulatory requirements, the high cost of underground infrastructure and long timelines associated with utility upgrades are contributing to water systems’ lower ratings, according to the report.
Dive Insight:
Local governments fund more than 98% of all capital, operations and maintenance investments for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, according to the report. Cities manage over 50,000 community drinking water systems and more than 16,000 wastewater treatment systems nationwide.
Sixty-one percent of survey respondents say water systems are a high priority, and 53% say sewer systems are a high priority.
One factor in the reported drop in water and sewer conditions may be tied to the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, which provided new funding for water infrastructure. Engineering studies and asset inventories, required to apply for the funding, heightened many cities’ awareness of water infrastructure issues that were not fully documented before, according to the report.
Stricter standards around lead pipe replacement and PFAS contamination can also “make systems appear to be in a worse position relative to new benchmarks,” the report states.
The report says local officials’ perceptions of their systems are also influenced by “growing environmental and operational pressures,” including extreme weather and aging underground networks. It includes a quote from Albany, New York, Water Department Engineer Supervisor Neil O’Connor, who said in the Rockefeller Institute of Government’s stormwater report that “we can only design a pipe for a certain amount of flow.” O’Connor added, “Should climate change continue, who’s to say that 20 years from now there’s not going to be a six inch in one hour storm that the city’s going to be dealing with.”
Cities are leveraging federal programs, such as a Bureau of Reclamation funding pool supporting surface or groundwater storage projects, to address water and sewer infrastructure quality, according to the report. And while IIJA programs expire this year, communities have several years to complete IIJA-funded projects based on when contracts were signed, it states.
State environmental offices allocated more than 70% of IIJA Clean Water State Revolving Fund and Drinking Water State Revolving Fund funding to states, according to the report. This suggests “the federal-state-local partnership is successfully prioritizing resources to the local level, where they are most needed,” the report states. “As these state-administered funds are fully deployed, they represent a vital opportunity to address the aging water treatment and distribution systems identified in this 2026 assessment.”
“Cities and towns are looking for a reliable federal partner to maintain and improve” water, sewer and street systems, an NLC spokesperson said in an email. “As Congress debates reauthorization of transportation and water infrastructure funding, NLC calls on Congress to support long-term, reliable financing and funding to maintain the progress that cities are making towards modernizing our nation’s infrastructure.”
