Pollution in a Promised Land "ss1.80"

MUNICIPAL RESPONSIBILITY: THE MISSING LINK

From an institutional perspective, these disparate water quality issues share a common denominator. According to the traditional English admin-istrative orientation that survived in Israeli laws, municipal governments were the key institutional address for combating public-health insults and nuisances. In fact, however, they were often the problem. For example, Israeli cities were responsible for delivering water to the tap but typically lacked the technical staff to ensure optimal chlorination levels. In addition, city governments profited from the water they sold to residents, under-mining any incentive to encourage conservation. Although the Licensing of Business Law empowered them to set environmental conditions for factories

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and commercial enterprises, protecting their local property tax base constituted a more compelling interest.

Drinking-water quality is another example of the bureaucratic quandary created by a multiplicity of central and local agencies. Technically the Minister of Health was empowered to set drinking-water standards but failed to do so for twenty-five years. Instead, between 1958 and 1970, a nonbinding instruction sheet adopted by the Israel Standards Institute was used by regional doctors to determine the potability of the country's drinking water.^[181] In practice Mekorot pumped and delivered 60 percent of the water to municipalities, but the cities provided the delivery, including chlorination.

Mekorot was a public utility that needed to be regulated itself; it was not designed to be an overseeing agency. But with its meager resources, the Ministry of Health's monitoring capacity was limited. The Ministry could take only about 6500 samples of water each year during the 1950s, testing for a very narrow number of drinking-water parameters.^[182] By the mid-1960s, this number had quadrupled, if Mekorot's own testing was considered, but the financial constraints also meant that only bacterial concentrations were checked regularly, and small population centers went virtually untested.^[183] For the most part, water quality seemed acceptable.

The serious water problems were to be found in areas where there was not only no information, but also no running water. By 1957, ten Arab vil-lages in the Galilee had been connected to Mekorot's water system, and their drinking water quality was comparable to the Jewish sector's. But that was only 14 percent of the Israeli Arab sector.^[184] A special committee was formed to address the issue, but it would take years before the gap began to close.

As chemical analysis became more precise, and environmental epidemi-ology advanced, the number of potential drinking-water contaminants ex-panded. Testing was expensive. The Ministry of Health's own 1974 stan-dards required only that drinking water sources be given a full chemical checkup once a decade!^[185] (Bacteriological testing was much more fre-quent, but cities with as many as twenty thousand residents were checked only on a monthly basis.) The Ministry of Health had little choice but to leave the drinking-water issue at the doorstep of local governments, even though it knew that they lacked the budget, interest, or technical capabil-ities to treat drinking water properly.

Pollution from sewage, arguably the most severe environmental prob-lem of the period, is also the best example of municipal failure. Although

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the Water Commissioner was responsible for water resources in general, sewage was framed as a local issue. Under the British Mandate's Municipal Sewage Ordinance and the 1962 Local Authorities (Sewage) Law that re-placed it, city governments are responsible for sewage.^[186] Under the 1962 statute, they are granted special authority to levy two types of sewage taxes to pay for infrastructure. The surcharges have been hailed as an ex-pression of the “polluter pays” principle.^[187] But until the 1990s, Israeli mayors made a mockery of the concept, diverting sewage charges to more politically popular budget items, such as festivals and football stadiums.^[188]

The Ministry of the Interior, the agency responsible for enforcing the sewage law, was also responsible for the solvency of local government. Perennially short on resources, the Ministry usually found it easier to ig-nore long-term pollution problems and to focus, for instance, on finding the funds to cover a city's education budget deficit. Moreover, the Ministry of Health was already involved in the issue of sewage water monitoring and standard setting. The Minister of the Interior and the Water Commissioner could place their limited resources in other areas and pre-tend that sewage treatment was somebody else's problem.

Symbolic efforts were made in response to the capacity gap. For exam-ple, Israeli kitchen sinks almost universally lack garbage disposals, in order to reduce the organic loadings on the overloaded municipal treatment cen-ters. The inadequacy of investment in sewage infrastructure, however, has prevailed until the present.