NWC eyes $1b target in plugging Portmore revenue leak
Published:Monday | April 25, 2022 | 12:11 AMKimone Francis/Senior Staff Reporter
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The National Water Commission (NWC) is projected to earn an estimated $960 million from its non-revenue water-reduction programme in Portmore, St Catherine, within the next five years amid alarming levels of water loss and theft. Alvaro Ramalho,...
The National Water Commission (NWC) is projected to earn an estimated $960 million from its non-revenue water-reduction programme in Portmore, St Catherine, within the next five years amid alarming levels of water loss and theft.
Alvaro Ramalho, country manager at Miya Jamaica, the private entity contracted to help the NWC maximise the efficiency of its water systems, in a Gleaner interview on Thursday, identified 10 communities, including Naggo Head, Old Braeton, and Newlands, as largely responsible for the loss.
According to Ramalho, the NWC loses 25,000 cubic metres of water daily in Portmore, which has a population of more than 100,000 residents.
Ramalho said Miya is seeking to reduce the loss to 10,000 cubic metres per day. Already, the company has managed to cut the haemmorhage to 20,000 cubic metres.
“We have special losses there due to the social problems that exist in those communities, and, therefore, we need special activity. We need to communicate with the politicians and local stakeholders,” Ramalho said, noting that sensitisation efforts are under way.
“These areas normally are associated with illegal consumption or flat customers which are unmetered. So they are paying based on a fixed estimate, but unfortunately, the fixed estimate doesn’t represent the real usage of water. That is why we are doing special activities for these areas. We cannot do business as usual,” he added.
Ramalho said significant time and effort go into preparing the communities for the water loss reduction project, first studying them before installing meters to ascertain the volume of water loss.
“It takes more time, but we prefer to be more accurate and our presence to be pre-advised and noticed to not have any backlash,” he said of the US$13-million project launched in December 2020.
“What we are promoting in this project is with US$13 million, we expect in five years to have US$19-million benefit to NWC. We will be profitable by US$6 million.”
Meanwhile, NWC President Mark Barnett told The Gleaner that the state-run agency remains pressed to package its debt for sale to a collection agency.
He said the NWC’s gross receivables stand at $47 billion, and after provision for bad debt, $5.1 billion.
“We’re working on that. We’re on that right now as we speak,” he said of the bad debt.
“We’re going through the process. We would have issued an expression of interest. We’re doing the evaluation as we speak and then the next stage is to get [over] all the approval hurdles and then we will go.”
The NWC president said that there are several prohibitive factors, or “legacy issues”, that would make privatisation fraught with difficulty.
The CEO pointed to the NWC’s pension scheme which, he mentioned, was never funded from the onset.
“If you take that away and you look at my balance sheet, it is completely different. If people pay their bills, it creates a different situation. Obviously you start to reduce your receivables ... ,” said Barnett.
“It has to do with how responsive and how people behave in ensuring that their indigenous utility can survive.”