West Virginia

In my area we already had a water system with its own treatment plant. It was paid for with Federal, State, and County money in addition to funds from subscriber payments. Everything was running fine. Then our County Commission was approached by people representing private investors (from Germany, I think) who offered to buy it. My County Commissioners went for it. Over time, other area systems (each with its own treatment plant) were bought up and connected to the WVAWC pipelines. Their treatment plants were all shut down after that, in favor of the single plant in Charleston. That's how all 300,000 of us ended up with a single water source in the heart of West Virginia's Chemical Valley.

These community-owned-and-operated water systems had no fiscal problems as you have supposed. Nearby systems that were not privatized include the Putnam and the Boone-Raliege Public Services Districts and doing just fine and their customers were unaffected by the WVAWC calamity. If economics had any impact on the sale of these publicly owned assets, it was the motivation of County Commissioners to have all that money to spend without having to raise taxes to get it.

About filling old underground coal mines with slurry: I haven't researched this but I'm pretty sure this practice is a recent development. I've lived here in the southern West Virginia coal fields all my life and I never heard of it until about 10 years ago.

I hope that helps you some. That's all the time I have for right now. I'm going to go back to the HuffPo article later and read a couple of the other articles that are hot linked in it.