A recent news report left a sense of unease. The wastewater treatment plant in Podgorica, which has served the city for half a century, is on its last legs. Engineers warn that it’s only a matter of time before the city's raw sewage flows directly into the Morača River. The river, which many look upon with pride, could turn into a sewer.
The situation is, as they say, "very difficult." A new treatment plant is an expensive and complex project. While officials search for solutions, it's worth examining the heart of the matter. How did a city end up in a situation where a vital system is on the verge of collapse, and fixing it has become a heroic epic?
Let's set emotions aside for a moment and try to ask a few simple, almost childlike questions.
Dialogue One: Why Is There Only One "Water-Bakery"?
Imagine there is only one bakery in your city. It belongs to the city, and by law, no other can exist. What do you think would happen over time to the quality of the bread? And to its price?
You would likely agree that such a bakery has little incentive to excel. Why improve recipes or offer new pastries if customers have nowhere else to go? Why maintain the cleanliness and condition of the ovens if no competitor can do better and attract customers away? And if this single bakery were to suddenly close for repairs—or, God forbid, collapse from decay—the city would be left without bread.
Absurd, isn't it? We intuitively understand that a monopoly is almost always a path to stagnation, high prices, and low quality.
"But wait," a thoughtful reader might object, "you can't compare sewage systems to bakeries! A treatment plant is a natural monopoly. We're not going to lay three competing sewer networks across the city."
And that is a perfectly fair point. Duplicating the main pipelines would indeed be absurd. But let's distinguish between the "pipe" and what happens at the end of it. Must the owner of the railway tracks also be the only one to run trains on them? Must the owner of the power lines be the only one who can sell energy?
It’s the same here. One company (or a cooperative of residents) could own and maintain the network of collectors, charging a transparent access fee. But the wastewater treatment services could be provided by several competing companies. One might specialize in industrial waste, while another could build small, eco-friendly local plants for new residential neighborhoods.
This approach maintains common sense in infrastructure management but adds the most important thing to the system: competition and choice.
So, could the root of the problem be right here? That such a crucial task was entrusted to a single player, devoid of any competition (even if it's only competition in service, not in laying pipes)? Perhaps the question isn't how to heroically fix the old "water-bakery," but how to create conditions for several to exist at the end of the "pipe."
Dialogue Two: Who Is Responsible for the River?
Who owns the Morača River? The usual answer, "everyone" or "the state," sounds noble, but in practice, it means "no one." If property is communal, so is responsibility—which is to say, it belongs to no one in particular.
"Alright," a well-informed reader might say, "but you can't just privatize the Morača River. Although it flows entirely within Montenegro, its waters feed into Lake Skadar, which is a transboundary water body, and from it flows the Buna River into Albania. Therefore, the pollution of Morača directly affects neighboring Albania and the protected Lake Skadar. Privatizing a water body of this scale is forbidden by both local laws and international conventions. Of course, Albania, as the downstream 'owner,' could sue in an international court, but as you rightly noted, that’s a 7-10 year process and won't solve the problem quickly."
This is an absolutely correct and crucial point! However, it doesn't refute our idea; it strengthens it. The issue isn't about privatization, but about liability.
Precisely because the river has another, very specific "user" downstream (a neighboring country), discharging untreated sewage into it is no longer just an internal problem but a direct harm inflicted upon a neighbor. And while Albania can indeed sue, it is, as noted, a decade-long process. A system that responds to an ecological disaster at the speed of a tortoise is a bad system.
And here we come to the main point. It doesn't matter so much who formally owns the river. What matters is whether there is a swift and unavoidable mechanism by which the polluter pays for the damage it causes.
Imagine if the city's "Vodovod" (Waterworks) company were legally required to bear direct financial liability for the quality of the water leaving its pipes. What if it had to pay huge, ruinous fines from its own budget for every cubic meter of sewage that entered the river? Fines that would go, for instance, into a special fund to restore the ecology of Lake Skadar.
Would the company then have found the money for an upgrade it hasn't performed in 50 years? That’s a rhetorical question.
So, could the root of the problem be not the absence of a "private owner" for the river, but the absence of real, financial liability for the one who uses it for waste disposal?
Dialogue Three: There's No Such Thing as a Free Lunch in Dirty Water
And the final, most interesting question. About money. Why is private business forced to constantly invest in modernization to survive, while a public service can afford to operate a facility for 50 years until it's completely worn out?
The answer lies in incentives. A private company owner risks their own money. If their equipment breaks down, they will suffer losses, lose customers, and go bankrupt. For them, updating assets is a matter of survival.
And what happens when a public service "breaks down"? Who pays for the consequences? The citizens do. From their taxes. Losses are covered by the general budget. No single official personally risks their fortune if the treatment system fails.
How is water treatment paid for today? In most European countries, and even in neighboring Serbia and North Macedonia, utility bills have long had a separate line item for this service. The citizen sees exactly how much they are paying for it. In Montenegro, however, this payment is "dissolved" into the general tariff of the waterworks company. It's anonymized, and it’s impossible to know exactly what portion goes to treatment and what goes elsewhere. The payments just flow into a "common pot."
What if the system were different? What if every apartment or business paid for sewage treatment directly to the company providing the service? Just like paying for internet or a mobile phone plan. Would people pay money to a firm that hasn't updated its equipment in half a century and is on the brink of causing an ecological catastrophe? Or would they choose another, more reliable and modern provider?
Competition for the customer's money is a powerful engine of progress and quality. The market would force service providers to fight for efficiency, adopt new technologies, and bear direct financial responsibility for their work.
The Birth of a Solution
This conversation began with alarming news about wastewater and led us to fundamental questions about monopoly, liability, and money. Notice, no ready-made recipe is offered here. It is merely an attempt to look at the problem from a different angle.
"But hold on," the most persistent critic might say, "what about real-world experience? In Sarajevo and Sofia, the privatization of waterworks led to explosive tariff hikes and scandals. Doesn't that prove this path is disastrous?"
This point hits the mark, but it only confirms the main idea. The problem is not the mere existence of a single large company, but a monopoly that does not operate in a free market. Such a company doesn't compete for the consumer by offering better service at a lower price. Instead, it lobbies government bodies to secure exclusive rights and inflated tariffs.
In Sarajevo and Sofia, this fatal mistake was made: they didn't create a competitive market; they simply sold the right to the monopoly. One monopolist was replaced by another, only this one was private and even more motivated to squeeze out maximum profit. This has nothing to do with a market economy—it's a classic example of "cronyism," or "capitalism for friends," from which a narrow circle of people benefits, not the citizens.
The true market solution is not to change the owner of the monopoly, but to destroy the monopolistic structure itself. Separate the network from the services, allow different companies to provide treatment, and permit new neighborhoods to build their own local systems. It is competition that keeps tariffs from skyrocketing and forces providers to fight for the customer.
So what do we see from this perspective? Perhaps the solution to the problem doesn't lie in finding "good" officials to manage an old, inefficient system. Nor does it lie in another loan that will be shouldered by taxpayers.
What if the right solution is to change the rules of the game itself? To create conditions where the river has a real "guardian" in the form of financial liability, and where service providers are directly dependent on their customers. What if, instead of one giant and unwieldy state system, we allowed dozens of different systems—private, cooperative, municipal—to grow, all competing for the right to make our water cleaner?
Perhaps then, we wouldn't have to read the news with horror. People would simply choose the best provider, and a clean Morača River would become not a cause for concern, but the natural result of a rationally designed system.