# Interview transcript: Myron Arnowitt **Source:** Myron Arnowitt, Pennsylvania State Director, Clean Water Action **Interviewer:** Brian Nuckols (Public Source) **Date:** November 3, 2025 **Topic:** Pittsburgh Water oversight, transparency, and the pattern of unanimous votes This is the full cleaned transcript, included as a representative example of the human sourcing behind the investigation. The passages the story drew on are the discussion of board questions as the core oversight function, the red flags around executive sessions, and the account of political capture. --- **Brian Nuckols:** Thanks, Myron. I know you've been tracking and working with Pittsburgh Water for a while. I'm particularly interested in the era from the lead questions till now, but could you give some background and context about your overall experience? **Myron Arnowitt:** Clean Water Action has been pretty engaged with Pittsburgh Water, formerly Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority, for quite some time. As an environmental organization, we've always interacted quite a bit with water utilities. One of our focuses, slightly unusually, is on drinking water itself. We've done a lot of work federally and at the state and local level on how we regulate water utilities. One thing that Flint clearly showed us is that it's the kind of part of government that no one pays any attention to until they pay a lot of attention to it. Transparency has always been one of the things we've tried to strive for to help deal with that. The lead issues in Pittsburgh were certainly something we were very engaged with. Pittsburgh's results were getting worse and worse, creeping up to the EPA action level until they finally triggered it in 2016. That's when most people started to learn there was a problem. In the end, Pittsburgh Water really showed strong leadership for how to address an issue like "our city has a lead problem." They moved to fully replace all lead service lines in the city. It took some change in leadership, some change in thinking, and a lot of people in the community saying, "This is a real problem." **Brian:** That's a good segue from lead to rate increases. Could you speak to the emotional quality of the community around "I can't afford my water" or "my water isn't safe" versus the need for technical expertise? **Myron:** Running a water system is a technical process. You need engineers and people with a technical background. Those people are not educated or inclined to know how to communicate that information to the public. That's often a gap agencies have: they have information incredibly valuable to the public but do not know how to communicate it in a way that helps the public understand or take action. It's notable that Will Pickering, the executive director at Pittsburgh Water now, came out of the DC utility, which had its own lead crisis prior to Flint. Someone coming from there understands that process. Rate increases really speak to it. People are going to pay attention to rate increases and want to know why this is happening. **Brian:** Based on tracking utilities across Pennsylvania and federally, what qualities make a board effective at oversight? **Myron:** Water utility boards are constructed in lots of different ways. Flint showed us some of the issues with authorities. The idea was "let's get this out of politics," but it also meant they were completely removed from anybody else and were making decisions without oversight. The challenge with a board like Pittsburgh Water, where you have political appointments, is that you don't necessarily have people coming to the board with technical or water-system backgrounds. In a lot of ways that's good. But if those board members aren't asking questions, if you're not seeing questions about status updates on technical topics, they are missing an important board function. Their job is to ask questions, to make sure they understand what the utility is doing, why they're doing it, what planning went into it. If no one's really asking a lot of questions, then they probably don't really know what's actually happening. **Brian:** Based on the last two years, most resolutions don't get a question. When there is a question, the CEO and a couple of members ask nearly all of them. The public appointees have asked very few questions in two years. **Myron:** I don't think that's uncommon. Something Pittsburgh Water did well with the lead crisis was setting up a community advisory committee — a needed entity to bring a different group of people in who came out of the community and could ask the questions that maybe weren't being asked. We've been using that as a model for other water utilities. **Brian:** What do you make of these executive sessions? **Myron:** When Bruce Dixon was director of the Allegheny County Health Department, he used to always use executive session when he felt the board needed to have a conversation when the public wasn't watching. Whenever there was something controversial, there would be executive sessions. You could tell that in executive session they'd all decided what the party line was going to be. When agencies use executive session, they need to be clear about what the purpose is. There are times you have to deal with personnel matters that require it. But they should be able to say what the topic matter is and not just say, "We're going to do executive session." Those are red flags I would see from my experience — both the topic and the timing. **Brian:** Is it possible for people to agree 100% of the time for two years? **Myron:** I think one of the lessons from the past on Pittsburgh Water is that good government practices don't just happen overnight. You need to practice them. That's why they're called a practice. The biggest lesson is that having the public engaged is the critical feature of any good government effort. Without public engagement, it's very easy for systems, especially governmental systems, to fall into political capture. That's not necessarily what is happening when you have tons of unanimous votes, but when there is political capture, that is one of the results. The system's being run by an entity that's outside the actual agency. That's why everybody has to agree, because that's the only way you can get on the board. We felt the Allegheny County Health Department board was captured by the county-executive administration; it was fairly clear board members were told that if there was dissent over what he wanted, their resignation letter would be requested. I remember a county government in a different part of Pennsylvania that had been controlled by one party for decades. After 17 years of unanimous votes, they finally had a vote where someone dissented. It was news. It's definitely something that can show you something, but you have to dig in a little to see what that something is. **Brian:** Do you think there are benign explanations for the patterns I'm seeing? **Myron:** One issue that could be a benign explanation is that a certain amount of work happens in planning processes. If the board set up a three-year plan to do all these capital projects and, as funding becomes available, works through the list, then approving them is not like a big deal. A lot of deliberation went into planning. So approving projects is not a big deal. Still, someone should be referring to what the plan is and where this stuff is written down. **Brian:** That's really helpful. Thank you.