Management of Municipal Water Services

Abstract

Municipal water services represent a key element for an effective sustainable and equitable water resources management. Although drinking water supply is guaranteed to almost all the Italian population and sewerage and wastewater treatment serve a large part of the population, several problems strike the management of municipal water services and are perceived by the society as severe troubles. This chapter describes the evolution of regulatory framework, driven by the Italian rules on all public municipal services and by the European water directives. The features of the infrastructures for water supply, drainage and treatment of wastewater are analysed. Obsolescence of water supply networks and sewer systems, leakage in the networks, inadequate fulfilment of the mandatory quality standards and difficulty in sludge disposal are identified as the main critical issues. Some proposals to face the challenges of municipal water services in the next decades are highlighted. They include improvement of the governance of the integrated water service, a plan of investments for completing infrastructures, advanced criteria to compute the service tariff according to the perspectives adopted by the Authority for Regulation of Energy, Networks and Environment (ARERA) and a wider use of new technologies for monitoring and control.