Call for submissions | The Municorn Review

Who’s responsible for a system everyone depends on and no one can opt out of? What happens when a model built around pipes and pumps stops capturing the risks a utility actually faces, like cyber exposure? How should a utility with finite capital decide which risks to act on first?

We want short pieces that take questions like these seriously. A few areas we’re interested in:

Everyone benefits from a functioning system, but responsibility for keeping it that way is diffuse. What institutions sustain investment in something no one fully owns and everyone depends on?

When the model drifts from the risk

Rate formulas and asset models tend to reflect what could be measured when they were built, usually the physical system. Risks that don’t fit that frame tend to go unpriced entirely, not just underpriced. What happens when updating the inputs isn’t enough because the model itself leaves whole categories of risk out?

Accountability without exit

Competitive markets can discipline bad management through exit: customers leave. A monopoly removes that option. Ratepayers instead depend on boards, regulators, elections, public meetings, and other forms of oversight in a field that’s difficult for outsiders to scrutinize. What does accountability look like with the usual lever gone?

Choosing what to fix first

Capital budgets are finite, and maintenance needs don’t arrive in priority order. A utility has to decide between a corroding main, an aging SCADA system, and a treatment plant upgrade, usually with imperfect information about all three.

The cost of things working

Prevention’s value is a disaster that never happens, which is hard for anyone to price or credit. The better a system runs, the weaker the case for continuing to pay for it looks. Then it stops running.

The arithmetic of being small

Treatment plants and mains don’t shrink in proportion to the customer base. Below a certain density, good management can only do so much. The economics themselves become the problem.

What the work is for, from the inside

MacIntyre’s distinction between goods internal to a practice and the external rewards attached to it looks different depending on who’s doing the work: whoever’s supposed to be tracking asset condition and never quite sets up the system to do it, a crew member who knows which main is about to go before any sensor does, a director choosing what actually gets funded this capital cycle.

Stewardship

Standard discounting gives future costs less weight in present-value terms, while many of the people who will bear those costs have no say in today’s decisions.