By Jim Sandoe, Member, DEP Citizens Advisory Council
Pennsylvania has a serious clean drinking water problem. You probably haven’t heard much about it unless you hang around the Department of Environmental Protection, where it’s talked about frequently.
State legislators are doing their best to not talk about it, even though the state has received four drinking water violation notices from the Environmental Protection Agency. The problem, as always, is money.
The DEP budget is now only two-thirds of what it was in 2008. Its duties continue to grow with Pennsylvania’s increasing population. The federal government isn’t helping either.
The president’s proposed 31 percent cut to the federal EPA budget will cut DEP’s budget by about the same amount. Federal grants will be reduced or cut entirely.
The misconception that these are actually grants is widespread. These grants are payments for programs Congress mandates through legislation, but attaches no funding to, therefore, the money comes as grants from federal agencies.
DEP is expecting a 30 percent cut in drinking water grants, 30 percent for air monitoring, 25 percent for superfund clean-up, etc.
The DEP responded to the latest EPA violation notice in December 2015 by seeking to hire more water inspectors. This was blocked by the legislature.
Currently, we have 43 inspectors on the job. In order to meet EPA mandates, we need about 85 full-time inspectors.
Currently, Pennsylvania inspectors have about double the workload of other state inspectors, and as a result, some systems are not being inspected.
The larger systems are getting routine inspections, and systems that have chronic problems are getting inspected, but smaller and rural systems may not be.
Pennsylvania has 10,000 systems to inspect, from large systems like Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, to smaller ones that have only 50 or so residents.
Right now, 18,000 people in the Pittsburgh area are on a boil water advisory.
A 2014 report by the American Society of Engineers gave Pennsylvania a “D” for water quality and said we needed to spend $13.9 billion over the next 20 years to catch up on infrastructure problems. The state had until September 1 to submit a plan to the EPA to do so.
Without a viable plan, or if it is rejected, we could lose $100 million in federal funding and even have a federal takeover of drinking water inspections. The inspections would then be outsourced at a much higher cost, and we would have to pay the bill.
Earlier this summer, the Citizens’ Advisory Council for the DEP (of which I am a member) voted to add fees to every water system in the Commonwealth to help pay for the inspections.
This was not an easy decision, and much works remains to be done.
The Legislature has left us about $6.5 million per year short of the amount we need to inspect all systems. Even if this system is put into place, it will be the end of 2018 or early 2019 before it could start.
The inspector position is very technical and requires a two-year training program. Will the EPA give us that much time when the Legislature isn’t showing good-faith efforts to correct the problem? It’s hard to say, but the fine could be more than the cost of the inspectors.
All the while, some unknown portion of our state’s population isn’t getting their water system inspected.
This doesn’t even get us started on the lead issue. The crisis in Flint, Michigan, is ongoing, with very slow progress. We have a similar problem in Pennsylvania, as our infrastructure is even older than Flint’s.
This is also a money issue that the Legislature’s leadership doesn’t want to talk about.
The proposed federal budget cuts 100 percent of spending for lead issues education.
These issues are not going to go away. They will continue to worsen, and we can hope it won’t take a large outbreak of some sort to get everyone’s attention.
I have personally talked to U.S. Sen. Bob Casey about the lead issue, and he is trying to put together enough votes to secure the money.
EPA is now projecting a new regulation to the states for lead testing in January 2018.
Pennsylvania does not have to wait for the EPA. We can start working on our own program now; it just takes leadership in Harrisburg.
If this seems like a serious problem, you need to call you state legislators and ask what they are doing about it.
Pennsylvania has a real budget crisis-- it’s the state Legislature not doing its job. We need real budget reform, not yearly fixes and borrowing $1 billion because we can’t come together for a real, serious budget that the people of Pennsylvania deserve.
We will never have money for the drinking water crisis and the lead issue if we can’t even govern.
James Sando is a member of DEP’s Citizens Advisory Council and a retired business executive with over 30 years in the automotive and logistics fields at the level of General Manager. His home is in Ephrata, Lancaster County.
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