Politics & Power Quote by Jerry Costello

“Hard-won” does a lot of quiet political work here. Jerry Costello isn’t merely warning that pipes are old or that rivers get dirty; he’s invoking a fragile victory narrative: decades of regulation, public spending, and enforcement have produced measurable improvements, and those gains can be reversed faster than they were achieved. The phrase frames water quality not as a natural baseline, but as an engineered accomplishment - one that requires continual maintenance and money.

The intent is practical and legislative: justify investment in water infrastructure by tying it to outcomes voters already value (safe drinking water, swimmable rivers) rather than to abstract engineering needs. “Population growth and development” functions as a deliberately neutral culprit. It sidesteps blaming specific industries, local governments, or deregulation while still pointing to the forces that lawmakers can’t wish away: suburban expansion, aging suburbs turning into cities, more impervious surfaces, more stormwater, more wastewater, more demand.

The subtext is a warning about complacency. Costello’s sentence implies that the system is at capacity not just physically, but politically: infrastructure is invisible until it fails, and success breeds budget cuts. By pairing “infrastructure” with “ability,” he also widens the target from broken pipes to institutional capability - funding formulas, permitting, oversight, and the competence to manage growth responsibly.

Contextually, this sounds like the language of hearings and policy memos from an era when clean-water gains were real but uneven, and when lawmakers were trying to sell long-term capital spending in a short-term political marketplace. It’s a preemptive argument against the easy temptation to treat clean water as a settled issue.