The Politics and Economics of Privatization: The Case of Wastewater Treatment.

• Author: Sjoblom, Will

Heilman and Johnson provide an excellent analysis of the privatization approach to wastewater treatment. Although its primary audience is largely an academic one consisting of areas ranging from political science to public finance, the book is helpful for practitioners of public administration and personnel from private industry who work with or for the public sector.

The strength of this book, I believe, is its thorough analysis of the interaction of the political and economic forces associated with privatization. Privatization differs from other public-private partnership approaches by virtue of its comprehensive and private structures and processes. In an era of increasing competition for limited resources, the privatization partnership provides an alternative approach to providing high-cost and high-demand services.

The opening chapters consider the emergence, nature and functioning of privatization and describe how the partnership movement resulted in part from the demand to do more with fewer resources. Another chapter provides the historical background of the development of national water policy. This chapter also describes how privatization developed in relation to changes in national water policy and tax policy in the 1980s.

The case of Auburn, Alabama, which provides a classical example of how privatization was developed in a model form, is presented. The City of Auburn was among the first cities in the United States to privatize its wastewater treatment works (WTWs). Without precedents, a model, or a context of national or state policy, the city was left to its own resources and those provided by the private sector to develop and implement a public-private partnership in the form of WTWs. The development required innovative thinking, revisions of state law and strong administrative leadership in order to execute a highly complex and risky deal. The Auburn case study provides an...