Safe and Reliable Drinking Water Position Statement

I.  ASTHO believes that everyone in the United States should have access to safe and reliable drinking water regardless of their geographic location, income, education, racial, or ethnic background.  

ASTHO supports continued efforts by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to protect public health. The following principles outline what ASTHO believes should be the focus of future efforts by EPA and state and territorial health and environmental agencies to protect public health by ensuring safe drinking water.

II. Overarching public health principles  

Support for uniform standards to protect health  

To promote health equity and environmental justice, ASTHO believes that there should be one level of protection for all Americans. Past proposals had the potential to create a two-tiered system of maximum contaminant levels for water systems based on affordability. A two-tier system will result in health disparities across communities and states.  Uniform public health protection standards for everyone in the United States and its Territories must remain the focus.

Support for primary prevention and other cost-effective approaches to protect public health 

The United States has one of the safest drinking water supplies in the world, but there are still continued and emerging challenges that need to be addressed. These challenges include an aging infrastructure, emerging chemical and microbial contaminants, nutrient overloading, harmful algal blooms, and climate change. To confront these issues, the United States needs to use primary prevention methods to protect drinking water systems by preventing contamination of drinking water supplies, developing sustainable and reasonable regulations for all water systems, increasing data sharing to better inform public health policy, and developing effective methods for communicating water quality information and any health risks associated with drinking water supplies.

ASTHO supports future regulatory initiatives by EPA that maintain a clear focus on cost-effective health risk reduction and are considered when there is a meaningful opportunity to protect human health. This will be an important focus to maintain as EPA pursues the first major element of its 2010 Drinking Water Strategy to potentially regulate contaminants by groups rather than one at a time.ⁱ As part of this element, EPA should consider the most toxic contaminants in each group when developing these regulations.

ASTHO also supports the second major element of EPA’s 2010 Drinking Water Strategy, which calls for fostering the development of new cost-effective, sustainable, and reliable drinking water technologies to address health risks posed by a broad array of contaminants.

ASTHO and its partners, including those organizations represented on the National Drinking Water Advisory Council,ⁱⁱ strongly support the use of multiple statutes to protect drinking water, such as the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act and the Clean Water Act, to more carefully examine the fate and transport of harmful chemicals through the environment, and to prevent them from entering water bodies in the first place. This also aligns with the third major element of EPA’s 2010 Drinking Water Strategy.

Support for health advisory levels to enhance public health protection 

As stated in ASTHO’s contribution to the National Conversation on Public Health and Chemical Exposures,ⁱⁱⁱ scientists need a better understanding of chemicals, their fate and transport, and how they can impact human health. When health risk assessment and exposure analysis reports are available, ASTHO urges EPA to consider creating more health advisory levels as done in some states, similar to the California Health Advisory Levels, which can be used to assure adequate health protection when uncommon, potentially toxic chemicals are detected in drinking water.

Support for enhanced collaboration between state and local governments  

ASTHO supports enhanced collaboration between the state and local government agencies to ensure safe drinking water. State and territorial health agencies and departments of environmental quality or natural resources need to enhance collaboration and coordination to better enforce state-wide regulations under all public health and environmental statutes and leverage existing resources to enhance drinking water protection. However, land-use and development decisions are largely made at the local level and play an important role in determining how various contaminants that affect drinking water sources enter water bodies from point and nonpoint sources. Therefore, local governments are also a key component in source water primary protection efforts.

Need to promote information concerning unregulated sources of drinking water 

There are a significant number of unregulated drinking water sources in the United States, including small community water systems and private wells that in many states fall outside the regulatory scope of both federal and state law.  An estimated 14 percent of the U.S. population (between 40-50 million people) relies on private sources for drinking water.^iv EPA recommends that private well owners test their wells for certain contaminants at least once a year or more often under certain circumstances, but owners are primarily responsible for the regular testing and quality maintenance of their drinking water.^v  Many private wells are tested at the time of a real estate transaction, but most states do not have ongoing testing or monitoring requirements for these sources.  ASTHO supports the need to further educate the public on the health concerns associated with private wells and the responsibilities homeowners have in watching over the safety of these unregulated sources of water. ASTHO also recognizes the need for more resources for public health and environmental agencies to assist well owners in testing, treating, and understanding the public health impacts of contaminants in drinking water.

III. Protection from Nutrient Contamination 

Nutrient contamination is a nationally important, emerging issue that needs to be addressed through greater primary prevention efforts at all levels of government. High nitrate levels in drinking water have been linked to methemoglobinemia (a decrease in the oxygen-carrying capacity of red blood cells), which causes serious illness and sometimes death in infants, as well as other potential human health effects.^vi In addition, nutrient-fed algal blooms can release harmful algal toxins and also serve as organic matter that can react, in a water treatment system, to form carcinogenic disinfection by-products. Nutrient overloading in U.S. waterways has been caused by a number of sources, including: row crops, agricultural livestock activities, municipal wastewater treatment systems, urban and suburban stormwater runoff, and air deposition.

A remedy to nutrient overloading will require collaboration at all levels of government including, but not limited, to the following:

• At the state and federal level, tools available through the Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act must be fully enforced to address nutrient pollution. Additionally, there needs to be continued monitoring of agricultural waste disposal.
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture must be an important federal partner, working in close collaboration with EPA and the U.S. farming community, to implement best management practices to reduce contamination from row crops and agricultural livestock activities. On the state level, states can utilize Water Quality Trading^vii and regional collaboration to improve shared water bodies (e.g., Chesapeake Bay).
• Local governments and development groups should utilize health impact assessment (HIA) tools and smart growth principles to help inform future land-use and development decisions to protect drinking water sources.

IV. Small System Sustainability  

Small systems serving communities with populations of 3,300 or fewer, represent 94 percent of total regulated community water systems in the United States and serve roughly 13 percent of the population.^viii Small systems typically have more limited economies of scale, as compared to larger systems, and are often challenged in terms of their technical, managerial, and financial capacity.  State drinking water program administrators are extremely sensitive to the needs of small water systems and work closely with these systems in the implementation of the requirements of the Safe Drinking Water Act. Due to the economic and technical challenges, small systems comprise a large proportion of compliance problems and significant resources are utilized to build small system capacity.^ix 

Affordability issues also need to be considered in the rule-making process itself, with appropriate timeframes for the implementation of new drinking water rules that affect small water systems. However, as noted earlier, two-tier regulatory levels—one for small systems and a different, more protective level for other systems—should not be an outcome of the rulemaking process.  Additionally, infrastructure financing options, such as state revolving loan funds and capital loans to help address new requirements, should be made available to assist small systems in order to achieve compliance with new health-based standards and greater financial viability. To help share limited resources, health agencies should encourage water system partnerships (ranging from shared equipment and management to acquisition) where feasible.

V. Increased data sharing and effective communication 

The fourth element of EPA’s 2010 Drinking Water Strategy is to partner with states to develop shared access to all public water systems monitoring data. ASTHO believes that sharing water monitoring data with all levels of government will help strengthen the scientific understanding of water quality and support better public health policy.

• ASTHO recommends that EPA work closely with state and territorial health and environmental agency partners to improve data-sharing capabilities and technology between states and the federal government, without putting an onerous burden on already strained state resources and staff.
• ASTHO recommends that EPA work toward gathering sufficient data and information to reduce the uncertainty of the potential for human health effects in the rule-development process, wherever possible and appropriate.
• Careful and thoughtful communication of the data to the public is absolutely necessary to provide context and understanding of the information provided. State and territorial health agencies and EPA must work together to employ thoughtful risk communication and messaging when water quality data is posted publicly.

VI. Recognize importance of federal funding for safe drinking water oversight 

States and territories are highly reliant on sustained federal funding to support the on-going oversight of public water supplies.  ASTHO recognizes that funding for two federal programs administered by the Environmental Protection Agency are particularly important:  the Public Water Supply Supervision grant and the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, as authorized under the Safe Drinking Water Act.  These funds are essential to ensure the ongoing oversight of the public water systems that serve our citizens.  

Approval History  

ASTHO Position Statements relate to specific issues that are time sensitive, narrowly defined, or are a further development or interpretation of ASTHO policy. Statements are developed and reviewed by appropriate Policy Committees and approved by the ASTHO Executive Committee.  

Environmental Health Policy Committee Review and Approval: April 2012 

Board Review and Approval: June 2012 

Policy Expires: June 2015