Today the Water & Health Advisory Council (WHAC) and the La Follette School of Public Affairs hosts a symposium marking the 50th anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), bringing together water sector leaders, academic researchers, and community leaders to discuss the next fifty years of American drinking water policy.
In her keynote address, WHAC member Kathryn Sorensen introduced our ideas on behalf of the Council. Here's our vision:
The Future of Drinking Water in America
Fifty years ago, President Gerald Ford signed the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA), the principal law regulating tap water quality in the United States. The SDWA was an inflection point: for the first time, the nation’s water systems were subject to binding health-based standards, rooted in scientific research and jointly administered by federal and state authorities. Bolstered by amendments in 1986 and 1996, the SDWA propelled significant advances. Today, thanks to the SDWA, drinking water is safer, water utilities are more professional and accountable, and Americans enjoy some of the world’s best tap water.
Challenges remain, however. Millions of Americans still face significant risk from unreliable or contaminated drinking water. Microbial and chemical contaminants still threaten public health in parts of the country. Aging infrastructure and persistent failures erode public health and public trust. Our communities deserve better.The challenges
A regulatory treadmill. The SDWA’s framework drives a continuous search for and subsequent regulation of contaminants. Initial SDWA implementation focused on the most harmful contaminants, driving marked improvements in health over its first three decades. However, a regulatory regime that prioritizes identifying and regulating new contaminants over eliminating known risks and maintaining health gains can only do so by imposing ever-greater costs for ever-smaller advances in public health. Vigilance is important, but advancing public health requires a focus on the most serious problems.
Missing risks. Today America’s most pressing drinking water challenges include aging and failing infrastructure, unsafe premise plumbing, a lack of access, workforce shortages, cybersecurity, and a burgeoning bottled water industry that siphons billions of dollars from the nation’s least affluent. New, unknown challenges are sure to arise in the decades ahead. Existing policy frameworks have proven inadequate to address these and other emerging dangers.
Underinvestment. Elected officials too often are unwilling to invest adequately in their facilities and organizations, prioritizing low rates at the expense of health and environmental quality. When facing the consequences of chronic underinvestment, many advocate for the federal taxpayer to rescue failing water systems. But federal funding is unreliable, vulnerable to manipulation by politicians, pits water against other national priorities, and creates perverse disincentives for locally led investment.
Injustice. Drinking water safety, reliability, and affordability are not uniform across the United States. America’s fragmented water sector is unsustainable, with tens of thousands of utilities operating nearly 50,000 community water systems, plus 100,000 non-community systems. Most of these lack the technical, managerial, and financial capacity to operate effectively and affordably. Systems that serve rural, lower-income, and racial/ethnic minority communities are disproportionately likely to experience contaminated drinking water. Regulators have been too slow to enforce the SDWA and too tolerant of ongoing failures.
Opacity. The American public poorly understands tap water quality, water system infrastructure, and the organizations that operate, regulate, and govern water. SDWA-mandated Consumer Confidence Reports fail to improve public knowledge and may even reduce public trust in high-quality water systems. This information vacuum invites fearmongering and exploitation.
These challenges demand a strategic shift in the decades ahead.
A vision for the next fifty years
To deliver on the promise of safe tap water for every American, we envision:
Prioritizing risk. Regulatory regimes must center on the most serious threats to drinking water. Utilities must build and maintain resilient infrastructure that prevents contamination and take measures to protect source water. Policymakers must weigh regulation of novel contaminants against these priorities and emerging concerns. Rules that compel communities to invest limited resources must be guided by the best available science on risks and achieve the greatest benefits.
Building capacity. Great drinking water requires great organizations. Investments in human capital must accompany investments in infrastructure. Water utilities need sustainable funding through service rates and other local sources. Although federal funding can be a useful complement in some cases, we reject simplistic calls for the federal taxpayer to pay for America’s drinking water systems.
America’s drinking water systems must consolidate. We cannot deliver safe, reliable, resilient, and affordable water through tens of thousands of tiny, unsustainable organizations. Congress recognized this reality when it passed the SDWA in 1974. Water sector leaders repeated the call for consolidation on the SDWA’s 25th Anniversary in 1999. We take up this call with renewed urgency and specific targets: America should consolidate into fewer than 6,500 utilities—through physical and/or organizational mergers—with a minimum size of 20,000 customer connections.
Rigorous enforcement. Regulators can no longer tolerate failure. Authorities must anticipate and prevent systems at risk of failure, and respond to serious or ongoing violations of the SDWA’s health protections with swift and effective enforcement. We must level the regulatory field so that SDWA protections and enforcement apply to all public, private, and nonprofit water systems. Commercial drinking water sources, including bottled water and vending machines, must meet the standards, protocols, and reporting requirements that apply to community water systems.
Justice. Rulemaking, enforcement, investment, and pricing must foster safe, reliable, resilient, and affordable tap water for all. We must eliminate racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic disparities in tap water access, quality, and reliability. As American society and economy evolve, drinking water regulation also must evolve to protect vulnerable populations.
Transparency & trust. Utilities and regulators must lavishly share information about drinking water in clear and understandable terms. We must replace ineffective and antiquated Consumer Confidence Report rules with more effective, rigorously tested methods of communication.
Toward more perfect drinking water
The nation has taken great strides to ensure safe drinking water for all, but there is more work to be done. The challenges ahead are principally organizational, financial, and political; we can overcome those challenges with prudent, visionary leadership. With appreciation for past accomplishments and confidence in the promise of future achievements, we celebrate this 50th anniversary of the SDWA and dedicate ourselves to ensuring that its 100th anniversary will be a triumph.
The Water & Health Advisory Council | 11 December 2024 | Madison, Wisconsin
Join us
If you share our vision for the future of drinking water in the United States, you can sign onto the declaration here.
As the Director of a publicly owned and operated water/wastewater utility, I whole heartedly agree with your vision for the future of drinking water in the US. Drinking water utilities play an integral role in the protection of public health and yet we struggle with garnering the support we need to provide this vital resource. Fueled by a lack of understanding, water utilities are all too often forgotten, criticized and/or politicized as opposed to being recognized for the immense value they have to a community.
I certainly agree with the concept of regionalization, but I'd also take it a step further and say the governance structure of these systems needs to also be considered. I'm not necessarily advocating to privatize water, but rather focus on special districts or other quasi-governmental structures so the costs are somewhat kept in check.
All that to say, you have my support.
Refreshing. Trust, transparency, simplified terms, love it. We have so many examples where the trust is implicit in society today; I've never seen anyone question the source of crude when they pump gas into their car! Time to change the metrics and language. Quality as an output.