Regulation vs. reasonableness
by Steve Richter, KRWA Technical Assistant

Safe drinking water should not be taken for granted. Good environmental policies require regulations. Practicing good stewardship and environmentalism requires a public willing to support the regulations. When regulations come down that local folks don't agree with, the natural response is to complain. The problem is that these complaints are often coming too late in the game.

Paying attention pays off

It's my opinion that all of us need to begin to take a more active role in governmental affairs. With some of the new regulations that EPA is being required to develop, it's time that water system representatives begin paying closer attention. KRWA is working hard to keep you informed of new regulations. Local people need to express themselves on proposed regulations. Failure to do that will especially impact the small to medium-sized water facility in Kansas. Take arsenic, radon and TMDL issues for wastewater systems as examples.

Off the rail?

There have always been those who have not agreed with proposed regulations. More recently, it seems that the regulatory community is stretching further and further to find new issues. Take the following for example:

1. EPA proposed a reclassification of gas chlorine as a restricted use pesticide. To use gas chlorine, each user, such as water and wastewater utilities, and swimming pools would need to have an operator who also has a certified pesticide applicator's license. I don't know who dreamed this one up but the suggestion shows little concern for the small system operator. Extra time and expense for training and then certification with two agencies rather than one are not in the interests by small town and rural water system operators. I hope that the proposal is pulled. If this were to become regulation, the operator of your system will need to be at the site where the chlorine is applied, whenever it is applied. That's virtually impossible as the application goes on 24 hours a day. Those who promote these types of regulations seem to have little understanding of the daily operation of a water utility.

I read the proposed regulation and sat in near disbelief. If only by some small miracle one of these `reg-writers' would have the experience of everyday, practical experiences of working in a water plant or distribution system, then perhaps they might never propose such regulations. It's my opinion that the reclassification of gas chlorine to a restricted use pesticide is no better an idea than suggesting that a sieve will hold water. It would seem that the intent was to ensure adequate training for operators who handle gas chlorine. Why not beef up training and existing certification requirements rather than proposing an entire new requirement and certification program?

2. The Consumer Confidence Report is a good tool for communicating with your customers. But out of the millions that are sent out each year, how many do you suppose are being read? From the feedback I receive, my guess is something less than 2%.

While it's important for water systems to communicate with their customers, it's too bad that Congress had to pass a law to force that communication. But they did, so let's make lemonade from the lemons. My suggestion is that you do what you can to make your CCR more readable and more interesting. Any water utility in Kansas could include a host of other information in their CCR -- and several are doing just that, as seen in the 2nd annual KRWA CCR contest whose winners will be announced at the 2001 Conference in Wichita.

It's no different than with KRWA preparing this magazine. This could be a boring publication and you'd disregard it. It takes extra effort to have effective communications so you know what your Association stands for. If you agree with it, you continue to support it. It's that support that has made KRWA the fine organization that it is today. It stands up for systems.

3. What would you say if I suggested that had extremist environmentalists been in charge in the 1920s, the faces of the four U.S. presidents would not be carved into Mount Rushmore? Do you think that is far-fetched? Think about it. Would anyone be blowing up a mountain to carve faces in it? How many protest groups would be on hand for the public hearings? Probably about as many that attended the hearings on Clean Water Standards last fall in Kansas.

4. At the time that the Safe Drinking Water Act's Lead & Copper Rule went into effect, the rule did not prohibit the manufacturing of faucets having a high lead content. That manufacturing continued for some time. My point is that it's reasonable to assume that manufacturers' lobbyists had some input into that, don't you suppose?

Are we really better off?

A friend told me that his grandparents had a well that was down near the feedlot on their farm. This was their drinking water source. You can guess that the well was likely contaminated with E-coli and fecal coliform bacteria. But the owners lived well into their 90s. By today's drinking water standards, that well water would be substandard. Because the family had lived there a long time and been exposed to the bacteria, they were somewhat immune to it. Today we would probably end up in the hospital.

A study reported recently in Popular Science magazine has shown that a missing bacteria in the intestines of humans caused stomach problems for certain patients. A doctor in a clinical study reintroduced those missing bacteria. More than half of the patients were cured after one treatment.

So for all the extra work and the extra testing being conducted on drinking water, is the water quality any different than before all the tests? Or has the quality always been about what it is today, given that public drinking water systems are required to comply with contaminant levels for 100 or so constituents? Because of the ability to detect, are we certain that the water is of any poorer quality? Another way to put is: Has water quality really changed or is the more sophisticated testing helping us believe water quality is poorer today than say 30 years ago? My point is that I'm not tossing out 25 years since the Safe Drinking Water Act was adopted. Regs are not a bunch of hooey, and not all the old family wells are just fine. My contention is that for many organic contaminants such as radon and arsenic, the quality of the water has not changed.

Get involved

It's critical that local water systems take advantage of commenting on proposed regulations. It's important that legislators and regulators receive your comments. There is a point of what's reasonable and what's not. The recent passage of the arsenic rule says that the annual financial cost per household on systems serving less than 10,000 populations ranges between $32 and $327 per household per month. Now that the MCL for arsenic, for example, was reduced from 50 parts per billion to 10 in one giant sweep, when will we see a proposal for 5, or 3? It seems that once the MCL is reached by most systems, then regulations are advanced to further reduce the standards. You have NTU's, nitrates and TTHM's as examples. Nineteen small systems in Kansas may have the ominous task of dealing with the reduced MCL for arsenic.

Have any comments on this article? Well, don't just tell others; post them on the Watering Hole. The design and adoption of regulations need to fully consider the impact of regulations, especially on small communities. If a utility has to spend large sums of money to address one regulatory issue, then there's that much less for the next. In the end, the question is one of reasonableness.



From March 2001 issue of The Kansas Lifeline © 2001 KRWA

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