the drinking water problems that disadvantaged communities … are facing,” and that “moving the entire drinking water program could nega- tively affect the parts of the program that work and not solve the problems that do exist.”


Furthermore, the State Water Board “is skilled in environmental and resource protection ... but [it] is not a public health agency,” and giving it the Drinking Water Program “runs the risk of taking [its] focus away from a very full plate of critical programs and complex issues,” wrote Cindy Tuck, ACWA’s deputy executive director for government relations.


Potential alternatives “that could be explored” include moving the Safe Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (SRF) to the State Water Board and the creation of an Offi ce of Drinking Water at the California Environmen- tal Protection Agency. Administered by the states, the SRF helps fi nance infrastructure improvements, with additional grants authorized for DACs. At the March 18 hearing, Tuck said the State Water Board’s full plate of high priority issues – water rights, wastewater permitting, stormwater and Delta fl ows – “takes a lot of manage- ment time,” and giving it responsibility for drinking water means the program “will compete with” and possibly lose focus to those programs. “There’s a big picture here,” she said. The Brown Administration “is not committed to a single solution,” Davis said, and is instead analyzing whether to keep the drinking water program in CDPH “and make some adjustments,” move it to the California Environmen- tal Protection Agency as an indepen- dent offi ce or move it to the State Water Board.


“What we are trying to get at as an administration is to fi gure out how to elevate drinking water,” Davis said. “There is some appeal to the idea that it would be its own offi ce; there would be one director whose only job it would be to make sure those programs are working as effi ciently as possible and that we are getting as many people


March/April 2013


access to safe water as we can in the state.”


That said, there are “huge benefi ts” in keeping the program with CDPH, such as the cost savings of not moving as well as maintaining the connection to the public health environment, Davis said. ACWA supports Perea’s AB 115, which would allow multiple water systems to apply for funding as a single applicant. DACs are often hampered in getting help by their inability to apply for and be approved for fi nancial help. “For many small and disadvan- taged communities throughout the state, safe drinking water is unattain- able because the cost of operation and maintenance of a single water system is too expensive for the small com- munity,” Perea said in presenting the bill to the Assembly Environmental Safety and Toxic Materials Commit- tee March 12. “Currently there is no funding process for multiple commu- nities that apply, making consolida- tion efforts diffi cult, confusing and sometimes impossible. By making the funding process easier to navigate that will incentivize more water systems to consolidation efforts leading to greater water system effi ciencies and providing more Californians with long-term safe drinking water.”


The committee passed the bill


unanimously, but its consideration of Perea’s AB 69 revealed the possible diffi culty that lies in fi nding a fi nancial solution to nitrate contamination. The bill would create a “Nitrate at Risk Area Fund” to be used to assist drinking water needs in hard-hit areas. Committee Vice Chair Brian Dahle, R-Redding, who voted no on the bill, said he understood the dilemma faced by affected communities but was con- cerned about a fertilizer fee when “a lot of this contamination that came to pass is from cattle operations.”


Perea said “what we are looking to do at this point is to create the fund but we don’t have money to go into it yet.” and that “we are still working on that as we go through the appropriations process.”


“… we know that farmers have already begun employing techniques to reduce the amount of nitrogen fertilizer that can ultimately end up in our groundwater…”


– Doug Parker, UC Institute for Water Resources


Listen to more of the interview with Doug Parker


11


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