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BERLIN (AP) — Oliver Bierhoff is the first managerial casualty of Germany’s early World Cup exit after agreeing to resign as managing director of the country’s national soccer teams and academy.

The German soccer federation said on Monday that Bierhoff agreed to prematurely end his contract. It was due to run through the 2024 European Championship.

Germany is set to host that tournament but there are concerns about the team’s direction after a second successive World Cup exit at the group stage coming after its second-round exit from the European Championship last year.

Bierhoff had a management role with the federation for 18 years since becoming manager of the men’s national team in 2004, two years after the former forward’s last game for Germany. He took over all of the national teams and academy in 2018 and received another promotion this year.

“Bierhoff has done a great job,” federation president Bernd Neuendorf said in a statement. “Even if the last tournaments fell short of the sporting goals, he stands for great moments. His work will always be associated with the World Cup success in Brazil.”

Bierhoff was credited with playing a key role in Germany’s 2014 World Cup win by setting the team up at Campo Bahia, a resort in the northeast of Brazil where coach Joachim Löw was able to foster a winning team spirit among his happy players.

But subsequent attempts to provide a similar team camp failed to yield the same results. Germany crashed out of the 2018 World Cup as defending champion at the first hurdle and has underperformed since.

“In the past four years we haven’t been able to build on previous successes and give the fans reason to celebrate again. Some decisions that we were convinced of did not turn out to be the right ones,” Bierhoff said in the federation statement. “No one regrets that more than me. I take responsibility for that.”

As a player, Bierhoff scored 37 times in 70 games for Germany, including two as a substitute to help Germany defeat the Czech Republic 2-1 in the Euro 1996 final.

Before flying home last Friday after Germany’s latest World Cup flop, Neuendorf said he wanted the sporting management of Bierhoff and coach Hansi Flick to present him this week with a sporting analysis of the tournament in Qatar and offer recommendations leading up to Euro 2024 in Germany.

Flick’s future as coach remains uncertain.

The federation said its committee will discuss a succession plan for Bierhoff.

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AP World Cup coverage: https://apnews.com/hub/world-cup and https://twitter.com/AP_Sports

BOSTON (AP) — Boston is planning to establish 11 wastewater testing sites across the city to help monitor for spikes in the COVID-19 virus.

The head of the Boston Public Health Commission said the city is partnering with vendors to create the sites as COVID-19 levels in wastewater across the region have begun rising.

Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, Boston’s public health commissioner, said the city will be sampling water from the sites on a weekly basis. Ojikutu said the testing will also help the city monitor for the appearance of new variants of the disease.

Ojikutu made the comments during a Boston City Council meeting Monday according to The Boston Globe.

The city is currently receiving information pulled together from Boston and 22 other nearby locations. City health officials hope the Boston testing sites will help them understand what’s happening at a neighborhood level.

The city is tapping $3.9 million in federal funding to pay for the project.

Coronavirus levels in Eastern Massachusetts wastewater have been on the uptick in recent weeks.

Tracking levels of the virus in wastewaster can serve as a kind of early warning signal, detecting changes even before people are able to be tested and the results reported to public health officials.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (AP) — New Mexico’s largest electric provider is seeking its first rate hike in years as it looks to recoup $2.6 billion in investments that executives say are needed to modernize the grid and meet state mandates for transitioning away from coal and natural gas.

Public Service Co. of New Mexico filed its request with state regulators Monday, telling reporters that much of the proposed 9.7% increase in base rates for average residential customers will be offset by savings from the recent closure of the coal-fired San Juan Generating Station.

Other factors include the upcoming expiration of lease agreements for electricity from the Palo Verde nuclear power plant in Arizona and the refinancing of utility debt to take advantage of lower interest rates.

Utility executives say that when factoring in the savings, the increase will amount to about 75 cents more per month for average residential customers starting in 2024 if the proposal is approved by the Public Regulation Commission.

Ron Darnell, senior vice president for public policy, likened it to checking out at the grocery store and getting the total before swiping a frequent shopper card or presenting coupons.

“That final total of what you actually pay is much lower, just as the final total for the average residential customer is much lower than 9.7%,” he said.

Darnell also acknowledged that rising costs have been a concern for PNM and that the utility is sensitive to the fact that customers also have been feeling the pinch amid economic fallout from the coronavirus pandemic, persistent supply chain issues and inflation.

Darnell said the cost of goods has risen by about 19% in recent years and yet the proposed rate increase will result in residential customers paying less than 1% more.

The filing triggers a lengthy process of public hearings that will carry through next year.

Aside from dealing with inflation and rising costs, PNM is looking to recoup $2.6 billion in investments aimed at modernizing the grid and meeting state mandates for more renewable energy. Under New Mexico’s Energy Transition Act, investor-owned utilities are on the hook for being carbon-free by 2045.

Solar and battery projects that were meant to replace the lost capacity with the closure of the San Juan Power Plant have been delayed and costs have been rising.

There also was a legal battle over when the utility would pass along the savings of the San Juan closure to ratepayers. The attorney general and consumer advocates recently asked the New Mexico Supreme Court to reconsider a decision that allowed the utility to delay the credits and work them in as part of the rate request filed Monday.

PNM, which serves more than 530,000 customers in communities statewide, has argued that issuing the credits now would leave ratepayers on the hook for a bigger increase down the road.

The utility said Monday that it tried to balance many factors in proposing what the executives described as “a modest increase.”

PNM’s proposal also includes increases for small business customers, commercial and industrial users, universities, water and sewer utility operations and for the electricity that municipalities use to power street lights.

Consumer advocacy groups are expected to weigh in on PNM’s request. In past rate cases, debates over whether the utility’s investments were prudent resulted in some reductions of the rates approved by the regulatory commission.

MEXICO CITY (AP) — Mexico’s troubled Maya Train tourist project will now include a 45-mile (72 kilometer) stretch of elevated trackway through the jungle, President Andrés Manuel López Obrador said Monday.

López Obrador has changed his mind a number of times on his pet project, which is intended to ferry tourists around the Yucatan peninsula. The project was initially supposed to run on an elevated line over the coastal highway, where most hotels are.

But opposition from hotel owners led him to change the route by cutting a 68-mile (110-kilometer) swath through the jungle between the resorts of Cancun and Tulum.

That faces opposition from environmentalists who say the train will crush or contaminate the network of caves and sinkhole lakes around the resorts of Tulum and Playa del Carmen.

And engineers worried the fragile, cave-ridden limestone soil will collapse under the weight of the high-speed train. But the president now says two-thirds of the line won’t touch the ground.

Instead, it will be elevated on thousands of 80-foot (25 meter) pilings sunk into the stony soil, supporting pre-fabricate elevated sections eight feet (2.5 meters) above the ground.

“This will have a minimal effect, because where they sink the pilots is where there isn’t anything,” López Obrador said.

Activists rejected the idea that the engineers could avoid caves when they sink the support columns, or that the train won’t have any impact, noting millions of trees have already been clear-cut for the project.

“They do not have the technical ability to sink the columns where there are no caves, because they (the caves) are everywhere,” said Jose ‘Pepe’ Urbina, a diver who has explored the caverns for decades.

He said the construction was already contaminating the normally crystalline water that flows through the cave systems in the Yucatan, which has no surface rivers and depends largely on the underground water.

“It’s stupid to build a train on this soil, build a train in the middle of the jungle, build a train that pollutes the water,” Urbina said.

The latest change also raised doubts about whether such an elevated trackway — which López Obrador said will include a 260-foot (80 meter) suspension bridge over one particularly extensive cavern — can be completed as the president has promised within one year.

The 950-mile (1,500-kilometer) Maya Train line is meant to run in a rough loop around the Yucatan Peninsula, connecting beach resorts and archaeological sites.

Some of the oldest human remains in North America have been discovered in the sinkhole caves known as “cenotes” on the country’s Caribbean coast, which were often dry and frequented by humans as long as 13,000 years ago.

JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — The manager appointed by the U.S. Department of Justice to oversee reforms to the beleaguered water system in Mississippi’s capital city said he hopes to wrap up work in one year or less.

Ted Henifin outlined his intended time frame during a news conference Monday, echoing the Justice Department’s order appointing him as interim manager of the Jackson water system. The order sets 12 months for Henifin to implement 13 projects for improving the system’s near-term stability.

Henifin’s work begins after the Justice Department won a federal judge’s approval last week to carry out a rare intervention to fix Jackson’s water system, which nearly collapsed in late summer and continues to struggle.

For days last August, people waited in lines for water to drink, bathe, cook and flush toilets in Jackson, a majority-Black city of about 150,000. The partial failure of the water system followed torrential rains and flooding of the Pearl River, which exacerbated problems at one of the city’s two treatment plants.

Jackson Mayor Chokwe Antar Lumumba, who appeared alongside Henifin at the news conference, added that he saw the city’s work with the federal government to improve the water system as an effort that would take longer than one year.

“We’re going to try to keep Ted as long as we can, but from a negotiating standpoint, the city has looked at trying to have a longer-term understanding of the various components of what needs to be accomplished with our water treatment facility,” Lumumba said. “We anticipate a working relationship with the federal government that is beyond one year.”

Henifin’s work is meant to be an interim step while the federal government, the city of Jackson and the Mississippi State Department of Health negotiate a court-enforced consent decree to mandate upgrades to the water system.

The negotiations stem from a complaint the Justice Department filed on behalf of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency against Jackson, alleging that the city has failed to provide drinking water that is reliably compliant with the Safe Drinking Water Act. That litigation will be put on hold for six months.

The work Henifin will oversee includes a winterization project to make the water system less vulnerable and a plan to increase staffing at the city’s treatment plants, which have suffered from a dearth of skilled workers.

Henifin first arrived in Jackson on Sept. 14 at the request of the US Water Alliance, a Washington-based nonprofit that works on sustainability and water management. He stayed for over two weeks and returned again in October and November to learn learn more about the water system and the city.

Henifin spent 15 years as general manager of the Hampton Roads Sanitation District in Virginia before retiring in February. He will be paid $400,000 including travel and living expenses to run Jackson’s water system. The city of Jackson will not pay for Henifin’s work, a condition Henifin said he demanded of the Justice Department before accepting the interim manager position.

“DOJ wanted to argue that it is sort of (Jackson) taxpayer’s fault,” Henifin said. “C’mon now. Yeah, everyone pays it, the U.S. tax(payers, the treasury, but it’s not coming out of the city of Jackson’s revenue.”

Lumumba and Henifin will host a town hall meeting Wednesday to discuss the city’s agreement with the Justice Department and EPA over plans to fix the water system. Henifin said the EPA is still testing Jackson water on a regular basis.

“I tell everybody this is the most tested water in America right now,” Henifin said. “So if you’re worried about drinking water, come to Jackson because this water is really high quality, and it’s very well tested.”

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Michael Goldberg is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues. Follow him on Twitter at twitter.com/mikergoldberg.