Water in this Western Maryland community is so expensive that residents put off bathing

Jared and Liz Morgan have more or less built the life they wanted.

They’ve raised three kids on the same land in Western Maryland where Jared grew up, just down the hill from a Mennonite church his ancestors helped found. They keep chickens for eggs, cows for slaughter and a few donkeys “just for fun,” Liz says.

Over the past few years, though, one thing has changed: Water bills in their area have soared so high that the family has begun rationing.

The Morgans limit their children’s bathing. Jared showers almost exclusively at work. And Liz, who maintains the farm and works in the pharmacy at a Cumberland hospital, showers just once every seven days.

Thanks to painstaking conservation, the Morgans in June used about a quarter of the typical volume for an American household of five. Still, they pay as much as $300 a month for water.

In the past year, residents of the Morgans’ rural Allegany County community have opened their bills to find $400, $700, even $1,000 monthly water charges. Single-shower weeks have become commonplace. One elderly couple bathes together to save water, even as they both fight urinary tract infections. Some have found stocking up on bottled water to be cheaper than running the tap.

Longtime residents have moved out of the community, and others are trying to follow.

An Allegany County commissioner described these circumstances as “criminal,” but there’s nothing illegal about it. The communities of Pinto and Bel Air get their water from a privately owned utility, and the bulk of residents’ water costs — which have doubled since 2022 — comes from rates approved by state regulators.

“Usually we feel like, ‘Oh, we can handle these things,’” Liz Morgan said in her living room one recent morning. “This is the one big area of my life where I feel like we have no control.”

The Morgans’ Western Maryland community exemplifies the promise and perils of a little-examined side of the U.S. water industry. Barely 10% of Americans get their water from privately owned utilities, according to a 2021 federal estimate. Industry groups argue that corporate owners invest crucial resources in small, failing systems, but their customers are also increasingly served by a small number of conglomerates seeking a profit.

Texas-based Nexus Water Group operated the Pinto-Bel Air water system until June, when it finalized a sale to American Water. The Camden, New Jersey-based company is the largest investor-owned water utility operator in the country.

A spokesperson for Nexus said that the rising water rates are affected by factors outside the utility’s control, including system size and customer density. American Water noted that municipal fees also exacerbate the community’s bills and said the company is considering discounted rates for low-income residents.

After The Banner began asking questions of the Maryland Public Service Commission, which regulates the state’s privately owned water utilities, Chair Kumar Barve said he plans to have his staff re-examine costs there.

For the Morgans, these water woes are a cruel irony.

More than half a century ago, Jared’s ancestors laid the pipe that first delivered water service, connecting this rural area to Cumberland’s water six miles north. The family sold the system in the 1990s, and lately it has passed from one out-of-state owner to the next.

Now the Morgans and their neighbors are hoping for a different kind of buyer.

Water as a luxury

Water wars have erupted across much of the arid American West, but in this Appalachian valley, water is plentiful.

Around 2,000 people live in Pinto-Bel Air’s ranch homes and quiet trailer parks along the West Virginia border, where creeks race down hills covered by deciduous forest. The Potomac River bends barely 400 yards from the Morgans’ farm and church.

Yet for many, running the faucet has come to feel like a luxury.

“It affects everything in your life,” said Jim Struntz, an 88-year-old Bel Air resident. “It’s on your mind all the time. You can’t relax. You turn that spigot on, you’re thinking about your bill.”

In PSC case filings, Nexus told regulators it was losing money on operations of its Maryland systems and needed rate increases to earn a reasonable return on its investments.

Regulated utilities are entitled to seek a profit under Maryland law, but many in Pinto-Bel Air are pushing for a provider that doesn’t.

The Allegany County Commission voted in May to seize the Pinto-Bel Air system and bring it under government control. A county takeover likely won’t happen quickly, but the effort could test whether a cash-strapped rural government is better equipped to bring clean, affordable water to its people than a Wall Street-backed corporation.

Rebecca Fincham lives with her husband, Shawn, and their three kids in an apartment near Pinto Mennonite Church. The couple runs their toilet on water fetched in buckets from the creek behind their home. Rebecca has a skin condition that she said has worsened thanks to intermittent bathing.

The Finchams don’t expect their circumstances to improve and hope to move out.

“I think we’ve been being robbed,” Rebecca said.

Larry Smith, a retired teacher from a line of Western Maryland coal miners, may be the most vocal critic of his community’s private providers. He takes his showers at Frostburg State University or the Cumberland YMCA and collects water-rationing stories from neighbors.

He’s convinced their only option is for the county to take control.

“When water is outside the reach of ordinary families, there is not just something wrong, something broken,” Smith said. “There’s something tragic.”

A series of rate increases

In September 2021, Nexus asked regulators for permission to raise rates for its Western Maryland customers, proposing the first rate increase there in almost five years.

The request drew little attention in Allegany County, and the PSC granted nearly all of Nexus’ proposal in phases over three years.

Before the final increase, in March 2024, the company asked for another bump. This time residents packed meetings, and Western Maryland lawmakers pleaded for regulators to deny the request.

Still, the PSC allowed most of the hike.

The utility’s Western Maryland customers saw their rates jump almost fourfold in less than four years. A Pinto customer now pays more than $500 a month to use volumes that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says are typical for a household of four.

County Commissioner Creade Brodie, a Republican, spent more than two decades working for a public water and sewer utility in another Allegany community. He worries that these costs will tear apart the Pinto-Bel Air community as families look to leave and their homes become harder to sell.

The charges facing these customers “should be criminal,” Brodie said.

Barve, the PSC chair, said in an interview that regulators expected that maintenance of this system would be expensive: It required roughly $2 million in improvements between 2021 and 2024, including to address sewage overflows, main replacements and to install a backup generator. Many factors — from infrastructure needs to water availability to local topography — can influence a utility’s expenses, and Barve said small systems must spread costs over relatively few customers, making rate setting “very emotional.”

Barve said he heard reports of rationing only recently. “That’s heartbreaking for me,” he said. “In the 21st century, to be an American and to have my neighbors having to consider” rationing water.

He said he planned to direct his team to immediately take another look at Pinto’s costs.

According to one report by Bel Air resident and energy procurement consultant Grant van Wyngaarden, a typical Pinto household pays over $100 more each month than a Baltimore customer using the same amount of water, and more than double what residents in Cresaptown pay — a community mere feet from some Bel Air homes.

Of the 16 private and municipally owned utilities across the country that van Wyngaarden examined, the four most expensive systems were owned by Nexus. No assessed community paid more for its water than Pinto.

Some still struggle to make sense of why.

The National Association of Water Companies, an industry group, argues that even if its members’ rates are higher, corporate owners invest more resources into reliable service and environmental compliance, ensuring a more sustainable system over the long run. Meanwhile, local governments may pay millions to take control of private systems, the group says.

As rates climbed in Pinto, Nexus announced a deal in the spring of 2025 to sell the utility to American Water, part of a $315 million transaction across eight states.

Hundreds of residents packed into the Allegany County fairgrounds in October. Representatives from the county commission, Maryland congressional offices and American Water all attended. Nexus did not.

“Water should not be something you make money off of,” one man said to cheers. “Water is something that is a God-given thing.”

Despite local opposition, the PSC approved the sale two weeks later.

On May 28, the Republican county commission voted to invoke eminent domain, the authority that allows the county government to take over the local water system for a price.

Private vs. public

A county takeover would bring an end to years of corporate ownership.

A company called Corix bought Pinto’s system in 2012 and later merged with another firm to form Nexus. The company’s board includes members from J.P. Morgan and BCI, a Canadian pension fund manager.

American Water, the current owner, is valued at about $26 billion and is partially owned by major investment firms BlackRock and Vanguard, according to financial filings. Last year, its CEO earned more than $7 million.

American Water bills itself as the nation’s largest publicly traded owner of water and wastewater utilities. In recent years, it has helped drive the consolidation of privately operated systems across the country and is now merging with a major competitor.

Jim Busch, an economist who spent almost 30 years in Missouri utility regulation, has watched this trend warily in his own state, where dozens of systems have come under the control of a handful of companies.

Small, privately owned systems tend to charge more for water, Busch said, but he described Pinto’s charges as “exceedingly high.”

Nexus spokesperson Karen Cotton said comparisons between its rates and those of utilities in other areas can be misleading, since factors like investment needs, water availability, customer density and geography all influence costs.

American Water spokesperson Marybeth Leongini said the company is talking to the PSC and the Maryland legislature about consolidating rates across its systems — a step opposed by some Pinto-Bel Air customers — as well as discounted rates for low-income residents.

“We fully agree there should be solutions for families facing financial hardship related to their water services,” she said.

Allegany Commission Chair Dave Caporale believes his government is better suited to find these solutions than corporate owners. The county hopes to tap state and federal grants to help maintain the system, and, unlike American Water, isn’t trying to turn a profit.

“They have shareholders to answer to,” Caporale said. “We have the citizens.”

For some, any relief is already too late.

Betty Shircliff worked for a Westernport shipping warehouse and took a second job running deliveries for Walmart to cover rising water bills in her trailer park. She and her family cleaned clothes at the laundromat, switched to bottled water and showered at her parents’ house.

None of it was enough.

This spring, the Shircliffs moved out. The last bill they received, in May, was more than $1,000.

“I lived there 20 years,” Shircliff said, “and I had to give it all up because I couldn’t afford the water bill.”