Too Good to Be True: Scottsdale and Privatization during the 1980s

This is the personal story of a very public project. In 1984, a respected Boston environmental engineering firm took on the industry's biggest engineer-constructors to win the first municipal water treatment plant privatization project in the country. The City of Scottsdale, Arizona had embarked on the "untested" financing approach to take advantage of tax incentives that arrived with the presidency of Ronald Reagan. Because it was the first of its kind, and the water industry saw many more...