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Description of project:
Providing clean drinking water and treating wastewater is a growing challenge facing local governments across the country. Notable crises in Flint, Detroit, Toledo, and Jackson highlight the stark consequences of failing to do so effectively. While local governments self-finance the vast majority of water infrastructure, the federal government provides billions of dollars annually to build, replace, or maintain various elements of water infrastructure. In 2024, the federal government allotted $9.7 billion for water infrastructure.
These federal appropriations are delivered to state level “revolving funds” that then lend appropriated funds to municipalities. States have discretion in determining which projects are approved and ultimately receive revolving fund money. As a result, there is wide variation in the number and percent of projects that states finance in any given year. This project is targeted at understanding this variation and evaluating the consequences on the quality of water infrastructure and the affordability of water across the US.
Description of work for research assistants:
A key challenge in studying water revolving funds is that the availability of data on applications and approvals over meaningful periods of time is hard to find. I am seeking a research assistant to help understand the design and functioning of state revolving funds, the availability and gaps in publicly available data, and work towards collecting and building a dataset of revolving fund applications and acceptances across the 50 states from 1996 to the present.
The specific role will involve the following·
- General research to understand the history and operation of the Clean Water State Revolving Funds (CWSRF) and the Drinking Water State Revolving Funds (DWSRF) as a national policy
- Research how the CWSRF and DWSRF differ from each other and differ across states
- Submit freedom of information requests to states to collect applicant and revolving fund approvals
- Digitize and clean state records to create an analysis-ready dataset
Supervising Faculty Member: Sasha Killewald
Contact information: Melissa Bora, [email protected]
Average number of hours a week: 3-9
Range of credit hours a student can earn: 1-3
Number of positions available: 1
