In a nondescript office on East Main Road, so nearly invisible that their own board members have been known to miss the driveway, sits a sovereign second government within the town of Portsmouth: the Portsmouth Water and Fire District (PWFD). Exempt from taxes by fiat of the General Assembly that created it in 1952, this quasi-municipal agency has the powers of a government: seizing property, civil and criminal penalties, and, most importantly, taxation.

Check out the PWFD charter. They have a state-guaranteed monopoly (Section 5). They can dig up streets and lay pipe without the consent of the Town(9). Not using their water? They can come into your house and forcibly connect you (5a).

And although they sit within Portsmouth, their responsibility is not to the town, but rather their ratepayers, a subset of the population which does not include sections like Melville, Redwood Farms, and Prudence Island. A ratepayer-elected 7-member board sets water prices and taxes — and they have the power to tax at the same rate as the town — completely outside the controls of the Paiva-Weed law.

Do I have your attention? I thought so. Because this is not some kind of paranoid hit-piece about the PWFD. Rather, I'm suggesting that they are a model organization. For sewers in Portsmouth. Why? Let me explain.

While the town languishes under a budget cap, struggling to maintain the 8% reserve that keeps our bond rating, the PWFD is flush with cash: on a $2.5M annual budget, their most recent financial shows $1M in investments, a 40% reserve. That's not counting their $8M in infrastructure, that's one million in T-bills.

A government entity, in Rhode Island — in 2007 — with money in the bank? Hire these people to run the freaking state.

Of course, the model is not extensible that way. They are successful precisely because they are a narrowly-scoped public utility. They are able to sit down, each year, and do a cost of service analysis, figure out exactly the costs of transmitting the $800K of water they buy from Newport, and split that 80/20 between water rates and property taxes.

It's that dual revenue stream that makes this a perfect model for sewers, with their huge up-front cost. According to PWFD Manager Bill McGlinn, tax revenue was critical in bootstrapping the District during the early years, before water sales could support the enterprise. But now, he said, "We've got the tax rate pared down to a point that allows us to cover debt service." And, he added, having the authority to tax allows them access to lower-interest general obligation bonds.

It's painfully clear that parts of Portsmouth need sewers; three separate consulting studies and the DEM are unanimous. It's also clear that there is tremendous opportunity on the West Side which can be most effectively leveraged with more robust wastewater treatment options. What's also pretty clear is that a Town-sponsored bond to pay for this doesn't stand a snowball's chance in hell. There's no political will and no other mechanism to fund and manage the project. The Town just doesn't have the money to execute, nor the administrative capacity, nor the share of mind, given the two-year terms of the Council.

Of course, I am partisan on this issue, as I've said before, since I live in Island Park. And I'm doubly suspect in my admiration for PWFD as a model since my uncle Buddy Kirkwood was one of the founding board members. But given the grim meathook realities of the current (and future) Town budgets, spinning this project out to such an entity seems to be the only way to make it feasible.

I think Portsmouth needs a second shadow government of water. What are your thoughts?