Our Tax Dollars At Work: Screwing The Environment In The Process

EPA May Weaken Rule on Water Quality: Plan Would Affect Towns That Find Complying Costly

After decades of ignoring the environment, treating water resources as if they were constantly renewable, polluting waters in the interest of big business, and years of health problems related to our water supply, our cities, towns, counties, states and federal government should have to foot the bill to clean up the water supply. Now that the dance has been danced, it is time to pay the piper and the band. But the Republican-dominated government is trying to wiggle out from under responsibility and actual efforts to improve our natural resources. Shame on them.

The EPA seems to be forgetting their intended purpose: PROTECTING THE ENVIRONMENT. Allowing greater concentrations of contaminants--including arsenic, lead and other heavy metals--is an invitation to poisoning our current and future generations. Shame on them! And shame on the Bush administration for even an inkling of allowing it to go forward in an effort to reduce accountability and responsibility for providing safe and clean water resources.

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing to allow higher levels of contaminants such as arsenic in the drinking water used by small rural communities, in response to complaints that they cannot afford to comply with recently imposed limits.

The proposal would roll back a rule that went into effect earlier this year and make it permissible for water systems serving 10,000 or fewer residents to have three times the level of contaminants allowed under that regulation.

About 50 million people live in communities that would be affected by the proposed change. In the case of arsenic, the most recent EPA data suggest as many as 10 million Americans are drinking water that does not meet the new federal standards.

Benjamin H. Grumbles, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Water, said the agency was trying to satisfy Congress, which instructed EPA in 1996 to take into account that it costs small rural towns proportionately more to meet federal drinking water standards.

"We're taking the position both public health protection and affordability can be achieved together," Grumbles said in an interview this week. "When you're looking at small communities, oftentimes they cannot comply with the [current] standard."

But Erik Olson, a senior lawyer for the advocacy group Natural Resources Defense Council, called the move a broad attack on public health.

"It could have serious impacts on people's health, not just in small-town America," Olson said. "It is like overturning the whole apple cart on this program."

The question of how to regulate drinking water quality has roiled Washington for years. Just before leaving office, President Bill Clinton imposed a more stringent standard for arsenic, dictating that drinking water should contain no more than 10 parts per billion of the poison, which in small amounts is a known carcinogen. President Bush suspended the standard after taking office, but Congress voted to reinstate it, and in 2001, the National Academy of Sciences issued a study saying arsenic was more dangerous than the EPA had previously believed. The deadline for water systems to comply with the arsenic rule was January of this year.