Olga Morales Pate: Why Rural Communities Are Being Left Behind on Water Infrastructure
Olga Morales Pate, CEO of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP) and a national leader in rural community development
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Why do we forget about rural areas when it comes to water infrastructure?
Olga Morales Pate, head of the Rural Community Assistance Partnership (RCAP) and a national leader in rural community development, joins John to discuss the challenges rural communities face when it comes to water infrastructure, why they are being left behind, and what it will take to change it. Drawing on more than 25 years of work in rural and colonia communities, Olga makes the case that rural water is not a niche issue. Instead, it is a foundation of national economic resilience, yet the country has not been building it that way.
“I don’t care what size community it is — the biggest resources are the people. Those are the biggest assets, and we’re not investing enough in rural communities to retain those assets.”
Key Topics
The Rural-Urban Disconnect: Olga highlights that rural water is a national self-preservation issue. Cities depend on rural areas for food, energy, and natural resources, yet the country has built a system that treats rural communities as an afterthought.
Water as an Economic Foundation: Water infrastructure is what Olga calls the horizontal infrastructure. John and Olga discuss how, without it, nothing above ground is sustainable. No jobs, no hospitals, no schools, no reason for the next generation to stick around.
The Funding Crisis Since the Pandemic: Olga explains how grant dollars have shrunk while project costs have soared. Communities that once qualified for 60-75% grant funding may now get 25% or less, leaving them committed to long-term debt with no capacity left if anything goes wrong.
Annexation vs. Regionalization: John and Olga discuss the difference between annexation, which trades community identity for access to city infrastructure, and regionalization, which pools resources across communities to build economies of scale while preserving local control.
Colonias and Water Insecurity in the U.S.: Olga describes the reality for colonia communities along the US-Mexico border, where many residents are still hauling water, and warns that new PFAS regulations may push even more small systems offline.
A Reactive System with No Data: John and Olga discuss why rural water systems have almost no capacity to collect data, and why data centers moving into rural areas could be a real opportunity to start to change that.
Links to Relevant Studies and Resources:
Learn more about Olga Morales and the Rural Community Assistance Partnership at RCAP
John references Catherine Coleman Flowers and her work on water insecurity and sanitation access in the United States
Olga references the Safe Drinking Water Act as the model that shaped rural water infrastructure for the last 60 years. Learn more at the EPA's Safe Drinking Water Act Overview
Read the National Water Strategy released by the Aspen Institute
Further reading
Olga references the Regional Water System Resiliency Act of 2023, landmark New Mexico legislation she helped pass that enables utilities to form regional governance structures while maintaining community representation - a model other states could learn from
For background on PFAS regulations and their implications for small water systems, see EPA's PFAS in Drinking Water page
“When we talk about rural, we talk about rural as ‘them.’ And I think that’s fundamentally wrong.”
Transcript
Coming soon.