Advanced Water Meters in Swanton Township: A Debate Kit

Resolution

Resolved: The Swanton Township Water Authority should replace every customer meter with an advanced metering system that reports hourly use, and complete the replacement within three years.

Background

Swanton Township and its water authority are fictional, and every stakeholder statement in this kit was written for it. The documented figures attributed to EPA, ASCE, and industry rate surveys are real and are labeled as such.

Swanton Township serves about 6,800 residential connections. Meters are read by hand once a quarter by two staff readers. When a meter cannot be reached, because a gate is locked or a dog is loose or the pit lid is frozen shut, the authority estimates the bill from the prior year and trues it up at the next reading. The authority reports that it estimated 31 percent of residential bills last year, and that billing disputes are its most common customer complaint.

An advanced metering system replaces the mechanical register with one that transmits a reading every hour to the authority over a radio network. Customers get an online portal showing their own use by hour and day. The authority gets a continuous record for every connection, which it keeps in its billing system. The fictional engineer's estimate for full deployment in Swanton is $4,100,000, financed over twenty years and recovered through rates.

The township board is genuinely divided, and both sides have written to the board. Neither side disputes that the technology works; they disagree about whether this township should buy it now, at this cost, with this amount of data collection attached.

Roles and format

• Affirmative team of three to four students, arguing for the resolution.
• Negative team of three to four students, arguing against it.
• One moderator, who keeps time and enforces the speaking order.
• A panel of three judges, who score both teams on the rubric and give a written decision.
• Round order: affirmative constructive, six minutes; negative cross-examination, three minutes; negative constructive, six minutes; affirmative cross-examination, three minutes; negative rebuttal, four minutes; affirmative rebuttal, four minutes.

Every debater must be able to say, for any figure used, whether it comes from a documented source or from a fictional Swanton stakeholder. Judges are instructed to penalize a team that presents a fictional testimony as a documented finding.

Case for township-wide advanced metering

• Household leaks waste an average of about 180 gallons per week, nearly 9,400 gallons per year, and most go unnoticed because they are silent. An hourly record shows a household its own continuous overnight flow, which is what a running toilet looks like in the data. Source: EPA WaterSense, Fix a Leak Week.
• A faucet dripping once per second can waste more than 3,000 gallons per year, according to EPA WaterSense, though the total depends on the size of the drip. Customers cannot act on waste they cannot see, and a quarterly bill arrives too late to connect the number to a cause. Source: EPA WaterSense, Fix a Leak Week.
• The average US household uses about 300 gallons of water per day, roughly 70 percent of it indoors, so the largest share of use is exactly the share an hourly record can break down by time of day. Source: EPA WaterSense.
• A water main breaks in the US roughly every two minutes. Continuous readings across a neighborhood let an authority see unexplained flow in a zone before water reaches the surface, which shortens the time a break runs. Source: ASCE Report Card talking points.
• The fictional Swanton Township Water Authority estimated 31 percent of residential bills last year. Estimated bills produce the authority's most frequent complaint, and a reading every hour ends estimation entirely. Source: fictional Swanton Township Water Authority billing report.
• A fictional residents' group, the Swanton Accessibility Alliance, has written that older customers and customers with mobility limits cannot check a pit meter themselves, and that a portal would give them the same information a neighbor gets by lifting a lid. Source: fictional stakeholder letter.

Case against township-wide advanced metering

• Combined US water and sewer bills rose about 24 percent from 2019 to 2024 and about 5.1 percent in 2025, faster than inflation. A $4,100,000 capital program recovered through rates lands on households already absorbing those increases. Sources: Bluefield Research and industry rate surveys, with the Swanton figure from the fictional engineer's estimate.
• A widely used rule of thumb treats combined water and sewer costs above about 4.5 percent of household income as a high burden. The figure adds two EPA benchmarks, 2.5 percent for drinking water and 2 percent for wastewater; EPA has no single official cutoff, and its 2024 affordability assessment used both 3 percent and 4.5 percent. Any rate increase moves some Swanton households closer to those thresholds, and the authority has not published how many are near it. Source: EPA Water Affordability Needs Assessment (December 2024).
• EPA's needs assessment estimates $625 billion in drinking-water infrastructure investment is needed over twenty years, with distribution pipes accounting for about two-thirds of the need. A township with limited borrowing capacity that spends it on meters has not spent it on pipe. Source: EPA Drinking Water Infrastructure Needs Survey and Assessment.
• Hourly consumption data describes a household's schedule. It shows when people wake, shower, leave, return, and travel, and it shows when a house is empty. The authority would hold that record for every connection in the township, and the resolution says nothing about how long it is kept or who may request it. Source: reasoning from the system description above.
• A fictional letter from the Swanton Civil Liberties Committee asks the board to adopt a retention limit and a warrant requirement before, not after, deployment, on the ground that a data set is easiest to constrain while it does not yet exist. Source: fictional stakeholder letter.
• A fictional memo from the authority's engineer notes that the vendor warrants the radio modules for fifteen years, while Swanton's current mechanical meters have averaged twenty-two years in service. Replacing a longer-lived device with a shorter-lived one commits the township to a repeating cost. Source: fictional Swanton engineering memo.
• A fictional statement from the union representing the two meter readers asks what happens to those positions, and notes that the authority has not offered a retraining commitment in writing. Source: fictional stakeholder letter.