FROM THE EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
6 SOURCE winter 2017
EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
CHAIR
Heather Collins
CHAIR ELECT
Uzi Daniel
VICE CHAIR
Kate S. Nutting
PAST CHAIR
Kirk Medina
ASSOCIATION DIRECTOR
Steve Dennis
ASSOCIATION DIRECTOR
Phil Holderness
TREASURER
Craig Thompson
SECRETARY
Tim Worley
TRUSTEES
DIRECTORS
CO-CONFERENCE DIRECTORS
Mike Gualtieri and Tammie Myers
EDUCATION DIRECTOR
Vacant
CERTIFICATION DIRECTOR
Debra Kaye
TECHNICAL PROGRAMS
Tarrah Henrie
GOVERNMENT AFFAIRS
Rosie Thompson
DIVISION CHAIRS
UTILITY MANAGEMENT
Christine Boyle
WATER RESOURCES
Katie Porter
WATER QUALITY
Kevin Berryhill
ENGINEERING
Katie Miller
OPERATORS DIVISION
Steve Twitchell
COUNCILS
MANUFACTURERS ASSOCIATES COUNCIL
Ken Malone
MEMBER ENGAGEMENT & DEVELOPMENT
Vacant
PHILANTHROPY COUNCIL
Vacant
STANDING COMMITTEE CHAIRS
AUDIT
Larry Lyford
PERSONNEL SELECTION
Phil Brun
SOURCE EDITORIAL ADVISORY
Vacant
Who Will Bring
Water to the Poor?
Rob Hills
David Hokanson
Joy Eldredge
Drew McIntyre
David Rexing
Conrad Tona
IN 2014, CALIFORNIA LEGALLY DECREED
the human right to water when it passed
legislation that every person living in
the state should have access to adequate
safe, accessible, and affordable water to
meet their needs for health and sanitation.
Further, the law declared that the
state’s resources would be organized to
guarantee this.
When the law passed, I suggested—with
some cynicism—to a friend who supported
the legislation that we should wait and see
whether it would amount to anything more
than a symbolic gesture. The real question, I
insisted, is who will pay to make the state’s
well-intentioned promise a reality.
My mind returns to this issue repeatedly
as questions of affordability, access, and
public health and safety present us with the
constant harsh reality that too many people
in California and elsewhere in one of the
richest countries on earth don’t enjoy water
as a basic human right. Why is this? Who’s
to blame? And who should be responsible for
fixing it?
It only takes a few examples to demonstrate
that in California the reality falls short of
the promise. Statistics are not available for
private wells, but the fact is that dozens of
California’s small water systems regularly
fail to meet safe drinking water regulations.
Chronic water quality issues involve
contaminants such as arsenic and nitrate and
in some cases such more acutely dangerous
pathogens as e. coli. Additional systems
will be unable to meet the state’s 2020
implementation date for its new Maximum
Contaminant Level (MCL) for hexavalent
chromium, a naturally occurring form of the
element in many areas. The challenge will
increase later this year when a new MCL is
set for 1,2,3-Trichloropropane, and so on for
one contaminant after another. Even more
disconcerting is that during the current
drought, many communities in California
have gone without any regular water supply
at all for months on end. And when adequate
supplies are available, and the water can be
treated to ensure it’s safe to consume, the
operation and maintenance of the necessary
treatment and distribution systems for these
small utilities is beyond their capability.
California’s 2014 legislation will shine
light on some of these issues by way of a
website identifying systems with chronic
violations of drinking water regulations.
The website will also focus on the questions
of accessibility and affordability, which are
related but fundamentally divergent from
water quality issues. A measurement of
contaminant X in finished water is a discrete
yes-or-no matter: was it over or below the
limit? What is accessible, and especially what
is affordable are much more subjective and
contextually based questions. Affordability is
not the same in Barstow as in Beverly Hills;
it’s clearly not the same in the Silicon Valley
as in the Salinas Valley.
Regulations do not handle context-based
differences well. Necessarily, they use single
reference points that are applied to everyone
everywhere. For example, affordability has
been gauged against a reference to median
household income (MHI), the amount at
which exactly half of a population is above,
and half below in annual income. Another
liability is that drinking water regulations are
developed and implemented individually
without consideration of cumulative effects of
the total impact of the regulatory scheme on
a community, whether the those regulations
are local, state or federal.
No one reading this should come
away thinking that I—or AWWA as an
organization—oppose water quality and
public health regulations on principle.
The truth is quite the opposite, which is
to say that we are very much in favor of a
regulatory scheme that is grounded in good
information (science, economics, etc.) and
makes good sense (contributes to genuine
public health protection and well-being).
And while I do not speak for AWWA as a
whole, my view is that we are for affordability
as a concept and are concerned that it’s
an issue that has yet to be adequately
considered in this country’s drinking water
regulatory framework.
The other critical question water utilities
and all good citizens must face is who will pay
for getting safe water to the poor in California
and Nevada and the country as a whole.
Continued on page 42