Darryl Jenkins, executive manager of the Chester Water Authority in southeastern Pennsylvania, stands near the Octoraro water treatment plant.
Editor’s note: This article is part of a series, Our Waterways, examining the health of smaller streams and sections of rivers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed. If you would like to suggest a waterway to feature, contact Jeremy Cox at jcox@bayjournal.com.
Catherine Miller has a message for private investors interested in buying the Octoraro Reservoir: It’s not for sale.
“That is not in the interest of our ratepayers,” said Miller, who heads the anti-privatization campaign for the Chester Water Authority (CWA), which owns the 520-acre impoundment in southeastern Pennsylvania. “You would get the same water and pay two to three times as much.”
In 2025, the Chester Water Authority planted 13,700 trees on the property next to the Octoraro Reservoir in southeastern Pennsylvania.
The reservoir lies on the border of Chester and Lancaster counties and serves as the primary drinking water supply for more than 250,000 residents across Philadelphia’s southern suburbs. A dam built more than 70 years ago transformed this portion of Octoraro Creek, a Susquehanna River tributary, into a mishmash of lake and river — a wide and winding watercourse that doesn’t course all that much.
The CWA also owns about 2,000 acres of land surrounding the reservoir, maintaining it in a largely natural state for the protection of water quality and as a popular hub for fishing, paddling and birding.
This tranquil setting, though, has turned into a legal battleground over the past decade, pitting the CWA and its ratepayers against a private water company and a cash-strapped city: Chester, PA. The outcome could have huge implications not only for the cost of water bills throughout CWA’s service area but also for the ecological health of the reservoir.
Darryl Jenkins (left), Steve McBryde and Catherine Miller of the Chester Water Authority in Pennsylvania talk at the Octoraro Reservoir.
Critics fear that CWA’s potential private buyer, Bryn Mawr-based Aqua Pennsylvania, could ban public access around the reservoir or sell off the tree-lined acreage around its shores to developers for a quick cash infusion. Replacing the natural terrain with buildings and asphalt could cause more polluted stormwater runoff to enter the waterway, they say.
Aqua has denied it would change how the surrounding land is managed. And while Chester’s state-appointed receiver, who helps manage the city’s assets, says he has no intent of putting the CWA into private hands, the utility’s supporters say they still worry it could be placed into a public-private partnership that all but does the same thing.
Privately owned companies now supply water to about 1 out of 10 U.S. residents, according to federal data. In Pennsylvania, it’s more like 1 in 3, thanks largely to a 2016 law that gave public entities more incentive to sell to corporations.
Aqua’s parent company, Essential Utilities, now serves more than 5 million people across nine states and is in the process of merging with American Water, the country’s largest water utility company.
The privatization saga on the Octoraro began in May 2017 when Aqua made an unsolicited bid to purchase the CWA for $320 million. The authority’s nine-member board unanimously rejected the offer. Lawsuits followed.
At the heart of the dispute stood the question of who controls the Chester Water Authority’s fate. Attorneys for Chester’s receiver argued that the city does, pointing out that it was the city that incorporated the utility in 1939. Chester’s main motivation for the sale is to get out from under an ever-worsening financial crisis dating back to the 1990s.
Attorneys for the CWA countered that much has changed since the utility was founded. Today, about 80% of its ratepayers are based outside the city — mostly in townships scattered throughout Chester and Delaware counties.
In 2012, the General Assembly passed a law reorganizing the CWA board, allowing the city and the two counties to each appoint three members. The CWA’s position is that only that board — and not the city — can decide whether the utility is sold.
The court battle eventually reached the state Supreme Court, which reversed a lower court’s opinion and ruled that neither the city nor the CWA board unilaterally control the utility. Rather, that authority can only be wielded collectively by the Chester City Council, the Delaware County Council and the Chester County Commissioners.
A sonic buoy floats on the Octoraro Reservoir in southeastern Pennsylvania, which is one of several installed to inhibit algal growth by emitting ultrasonic sound waves.
The ruling effectively blocked Aqua’s acquisition attempt, but those who want to keep the CWA public say the fight isn’t over. “Temporarily, that [ruling] has killed the current Aqua and Chester city desire to kill CWA,” said Bill Ferguson, a CWA ratepayer and co-founder of Keep Water Affordable, a grassroots group fighting the privatization. “But it’s not going to end it.”
Several CWA board members who opposed the privatization effort face the end of their terms in 2027.
In a statement to the Chesapeake Bay Journal, an Aqua spokeswoman said the company “respects” the Supreme Court decision. She didn’t respond to a follow-up question seeking to know whether Aqua is still pursuing the purchase of CWA.
Against that contentious backdrop, the water authority itself in recent years has waged a quiet campaign to clean up the reservoir. The waterway, for example, has long been plagued by nitrates, which, if ingested by infants at high enough levels, can cause “blue baby syndrome,” a potentially fatal condition. Researchers blame the problem on fertilizer from farms within the creek’s 200-square-mile watershed.
Nitrogen and phosphorus runoff has also been a scourge. Those nutrients, also found in manure and fertilizer, have given rise to algae blooms so pervasive that CWA engineers sometimes take the costly step of diluting the impurities with water from the Susquehanna River 14 miles downstream.
“This [water] just sits here,” said Stephen McBryde, CWA’s director of plant operations, in an interview along the reservoir’s banks. “It doesn’t really move like in the Susquehanna River. So, algae can grow. The quality gets worse. So, we have to turn on the Susquehanna [intake pumps].”
The utility has hired a consultant to work with farmers on a voluntary basis to improve their nutrient management practices. To help filter pollutants, it partnered last year with the Alliance for the Chesapeake Bay to plant more than 13,000 trees and shrubs across 53 acres near the reservoir’s shores.
In 2024, the CWA turned to technology. Workers installed floating aeration devices to help mix the water column and keep oxygen levels from dropping at lower depths. Such “dead zones” often are so devoid of oxygen that they can kill any aquatic life trapped within them.
And the utility also placed several “sonic buoys” across the reservoir. These emit ultrasonic frequencies to control algae growth. “Between aeration and these ultrasonic units, we definitely have seen less algae,” McBryde added.