A research project supported by the European Commission fp5: Energy, Environment and Sustainable Development

2City background

As of 31^st December 2002, the commune of Milan had a population of 1.3 million inhabitants¹.

3Water and wastewater undertaking

3.1Background

This section lays out a short introduction to the context of the case study water and wastewater undertaking, the role of the municipalities as well as a brief historical background of water and wastewater services in the city. It also includes information on the ownership, operational management responsibility and administrative structure of the water and wastewater services.

3.2Water and wastewater undertaking profile

Since June 2003, water supply and sewerage in the municipality of Milan is provided by the wholly municipally-owned PLC Metropolitana Milanese (MM) under a two to five year concession. As of February 2005, wastewater treatment services were being provided by two private consortia that had built two major treatment plants², respectively operating under a 12 and half years contracts³. However, wastewater services provided were not covering the totality of requirements of the city of Milan.

DATA	CONCEPT
Undertaking identification	Metropolitana Milanese (MM)
Geographical scope	City of Milan
Type of activity	Water supply and sewerage
Type of assets ownership	Public
Type of operations	Public
Total personnel (no)	455^4
Tariffs (EUR/m)	€ 0.58/m^3 ^5

3.3System profile

3.3.1Institutional developments and territorial scope of water operations

The restructuring of water supply and sanitation operations has been informed by the national reform of the water sector, introduced by the 1994 Galli Law (see Lobina, 2005: pp. 9-11). Pursuant to the Galli Law, responsibility for water supply and sanitation operations should have been transferred to a public authority representing all the municipalities within the relevant concession area, known as ATO (Ambito Territoriale Ottimale). In the case of Milan, the regional government has decided that, unlike any other ATO in Italy, Milan would fall within an ATO constituted of a sole commune. The decision was justified in the light of the technical and institutional specificity of water operations in the municipality of Milan in respect to the other 187 municipalities of the Province of Milan⁶. Regional law 21/1998 provided for the establishment of 12 ATOs within Lombardy, all corresponding to the territory of each Province. It was only the Province of Milan that was divided into two ATOs, one for the city of Milan (ATO Città di Milano) and the other for the remainder of the Province of Milan (ATO Provincia di Milano). However, this has not prevented the emergence of institutional conflicts within the ATO Città di Milano.
The territory of ATO Città di Milano matches the administrative borders of the municipality of Milan. Pursuant to regional law 21/98 the governing body of the ATO was originally constituted by the municipality of Milan (with 95% of voting power) and the Province of Milan (that could express 5% of votes)⁷. External representation of the ATO was entrusted with the president of the Province and the mayor of Milan, who had in turn delegated one member of the provincial and the municipal government respectively.
The ATO governing body is responsible for choosing the organizational form underlying water operations and selecting the water operator. It is also responsible for carrying out the survey of infrastructure, elaborating the investment program, defining tariffs and regulating the water operator, through its administrative arm also known as “Segreteria tecnica”, or technical secretariat, which was set up within the administrative structure of the municipality of Milan.
The set up of the Ambito Authority took place in November 2001. Since November 2001, in spite of the ATO constitution the recognition began. Before the delegation MM prepared an inventory of the received assets. Within December 2004 the Ambito plan should be written and approved, even if the Region has not yet arranged the guidelines. Even before that date MM has already begun to receive the management guidelines. In July 2003, in order to put an end to continuous conflicts between the municipality and the Province of Milan, the Municipality of Milan became the unique coordinating body thus excluding the provincial administration from the ATO governing body.

3.3.2The water supply system

With its 31 pumping stations and 550 wells, the city of Milan entirely relies on groundwater as a source for water supply. The water pipeline network is km 2,300 long. The total volume of water supplied yearly amounts to 250 million m^{3 8}. Milan counts 49,000 users, relying on a per capita endowment of 500 litres per day.
A problematic aspect of Milan’s water system is the continuously rising groundwater. This phenomenon represents a serious problem for the guarantee of the quality features of the delivered water. The groundwater, when going up, is contaminated chemically by the compounds discharged in the soil by several industrial, artisan and agricultural activities. In this way, the chemicals present in the soil contaminate the water designated to household consumers. Between 1994 and 1999 51 wells have been abandoned, as their water was not treated⁹. In order to be able to guarantee the quality of the water withdrawn, substantial investments are needed to build plants in non contaminated areas, to withdraw water from deeper groundwater (which present acceptable quality features) and to upgrade drinking water treatment plants by introducing active carbon filtration¹⁰.
The explanation for rising groundwater levels lies in the trend of decreasing water consumption as a result of the economic transformation which the city has undergone, with industries being increasingly replaced by services, as well as of demographic patterns. Since the 80’s the Milan productive system has known important structural economic changes. An increase of small-medium enterprises has been registered, together with a decline of major industries. For what concerns the economic activity composition, in the same period the tertiary sector (i.e. services) increased and the industrial sector activities decrease. As a consequence, bigger industries are transferred in the suburbs¹¹. At the same time Milan residents decreased from about 1,700,000 in 1980 to over 1,300,000 in 1999 (Venegoni, 2000, p. 85).

3.3.3Sewerage and wastewater treatment

The sewerage pipeline network is 1,380 km long¹². It is a combined system (i.e. it catches both sewage and rainwater) and works by gravity (i.e. it exploits the soil slope, without needing pumping stations). This because the territory of Milan municipality has a slight slope (0.27%) following the North-West direction. The construction of sewerage network has been conditioned by the planimetric asset which determined the formation of concentric zones with respect to the central part of the city. Each zone is served by its own collector (Venegoni, 2000: p. 23).
Wastewater treatment relies on completion of three treatment plants:

• 
  Nosedo (1,250,000 population equivalent) is a secondary treatment plant¹³ which will serve the city center and the central-eastern part of the city. The first part which has a capacity of 350,000 population equivalent was inaugurated in April 2003 (Corte dei Conti, 2003). The plant was fully operational by end 2004;
  
• 
  Milan South (1,050,000 population equivalent), also know as San Rocco or Ronchetto delle Rane, is a secondary treatment plant that will serve the western zone of Milan and Settimo Milanese municipalities (Corte dei Conti, 2003). The Milan South plant became operation by September 2004¹⁴;
  
• 
  Peschiera Borromeo (250,000 population equivalent) that will consists of a biological treatment plant in addition to an existing treatment plant which serves nine municipalities in the eastern part of the city (Corte dei Conti, 2003). Rather than being a new treatment plant, this is the extension of an existing plant, which CAP started building in 1975 and completed in the 80’s. The original plant had a treatment capacity of 316,000 population equivalent (Global Water Report, 2001). The Peschiera Borromeo plant, which will treat wastewater from the eastern part of Milan, is being constructed and will be managed under the responsibility and supervision of publicly-owned enterprise CAP, owned by a number of municipalities of the Province of Milan. In order to benefit from wastewater services provided under CAP’s responsibility, the municipality of Milan has signed a 26-year agreement in August 2000, providing for the transfer of wastewater charges paid by consumers in eastern Milan to CAP¹⁵.
  

The choice to treat the discharges in three distinct plants derives from the existing collector characteristics (see above)¹⁶.