This week President Biden visited Baltimore, a Democratic stronghold where only one Republican has been elected mayor since 1943 and no Republican has served on the City Council since World War II. While Mr. Biden touted his infrastructure plan at the Port of Baltimore, he failed to mention the sad state of the city and its crumbling infrastructure.

Baltimore’s decline is extraordinary. The city’s population is only 62% of its 1950 peak, and nearly 20% of its jobs have been shed since 1990. Shortly after World War II, the city’s median household income was higher than the national average; now it is more than 25% below. Baltimore’s poverty rate was once lower than the national average; now it’s nearly double.

The city’s economy isn’t the only thing collapsing. Mr. Biden, while touting his infrastructure plan, failed to mention that Baltimore’s water and wastewater infrastructure is crumbling. These systems account for 14% of the city’s total operating budget, roughly equal to the Baltimore Police Department’s operating budget and nearly double that of the Fire Department. Water and wastewater dominate the city’s capital budget, accounting for 56% of the total.

If the president had been properly briefed and had chosen to speak about Baltimore’s water system, he would have been forced to proclaim that it is in a state of disrepair and leaks like a sieve. In 2018 Baltimore leaked away over 25% of its water, significantly more than most comparable cities.

And there is no sign that the leaks will be plugged soon. All Maryland water systems serving populations over 10,000 must submit an annual audit. For those with water-loss rates greater than 10%, submission of a water-loss-reduction plan is required. But Baltimore is statutorily exempt from this process.

Water loss isn’t the only problem plaguing Baltimore’s decrepit water-distribution system. The city purchased more than $80 million worth of new digital meters in 2013 to mitigate billing errors. Despite this investment, thousands of meters are malfunctioning. This has resulted in millions of dollars in lost revenue. Of Baltimore’s thousands of meter-repair requests, 95% remain unresolved for a year or more. To make matters worse, the city’s computer network is vulnerable to hacking, and a 2019 ransomware attack prevented Baltimore from issuing water bills for three months.

Baltimore’s wastewater system is arguably in even worse shape than its water system. The problem is so bad that in 2002, the Environmental Protection Agency slapped the city with a federal consent decree to reduce sewage pollution and modernize the city’s wastewater infrastructure by 2016. When that deadline came, major projects were incomplete and had already cost about $900 million. Baltimore’s wastewater system, which experienced 622 reported sewage backups in 2004 and nearly 5,000 in 2015, wasn’t even close to meeting the 2016 deadline. As a result, the deadline has been pushed back to 2030.

Baltimore isn’t capable of managing its water and wastewater systems, but that hasn’t stopped activists and the city’s political elite from protecting their status as public monopolies. The City Council proposed a ballot issue to amend Baltimore’s charter and ban the private sector from any involvement in the city’s water and sewerage systems. The amendment passed easily in November 2018. Baltimore is the only city in the U.S. that prohibits private solutions for fixing its dysfunctional water and sewerage systems.

The charter amendment protects the very system that has brought Baltimore’s public water and wastewater monopoly to its knees. If Mr. Biden had wanted to connect with Baltimore residents about their failing infrastructure, he would have addressed the city’s leaking pipes and broken sewers instead of repeating the wrong-headed idea that supply-chain bottlenecks at the port are driving inflation.