WaterNews for February 4, 2003
WaterNews is a weekly on-line publication that announces publications, policies, and activities of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Water.
Inside this week’s WaterNews
EPA Announces 2004 Funding to Support Great Lakes Legacy Act
EPA Administrator Christie Whitman has announced that the President's 2004 budget includes nearly $34 million to improve Great Lakes water quality. Of the nearly $34 million, $15 million will support the Great Lakes Legacy Act and the cleanup of contaminated sediments. This new funding nearly doubles EPA's support of Great Lakes activities.
With the $15 million in Great Lakes Legacy Act funding, EPA expects to increase new cleanup starts in the Great Lakes by all partners from three starts to between
five and six. Over the past five years, under existing authorities, EPA and partners
have remediated 100,000 to 400,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment per year.
Sediment contamination is a significant source of toxic pollutants affecting bottom-dwelling organisms, fish, and wildlife in Great Lakes Areas of Concern.
Human health can also be impacted via the bioaccumulation of toxic substances through the food chain.
EPA will work with states, tribes, and other stakeholders to identify sites for
remediation.
In addition to Legacy Act resources, the Great Lakes National Program Office will receive $15.4 million, Lakewide Management Plans will be funded at $2.7 million and invasive species research will be funded at $500,000 for a combined total of $33.6 million to support Great Lakes activities.
High-Tech Sanitary Surveys
The Drinking Water Academy (DWA) is actively working with many states nationwide towards the support of the use of Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) to conduct sanitary surveys. Use of PDAs in the collection of survey data will reduce data input time in the office, encourage better tracking of system information, and allow a state to better track drinking water system deficiencies. For more information, please contact Jamie Bourne at 202-564-4095.
Fish Tissue Survey - Preliminary Results
We are happy to announce that the first results are available from the National Study of Chemical Residues in Lake Fish Tissue. These first-year results are just a quarter of the final national fish tissue data set, and they cannot be used for making general conclusions. Given that caveat, for game fish, the preliminary data show so far that dioxins and furans, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and mercury were in all of the first year sampling sites. DDT was detected at 80% of the sites. Several target chemicals were not found in the first year fish samples (toxaphene, organophosphate pesticides, polyaromatic hydrocarbons, and some semi-volatile organics).
This 4-year study is EPA’s largest survey of freshwater fish contamination. It’s also the only national fish monitoring effort EPA has done for more than a decade. Due to be published in 2005, the study is unique because it’s based on a statistical sampling design, and it includes the most chemicals ever studied in fish. Agencies in 47 states, four tribes, and two other federal agencies are collecting fish from 500 U.S. lakes and reservoirs. The results that are available now cover samples from 370 lakes and reservoirs. EPA will finish sampling and analysis in 2004. You can learn more about the fish study is available online at http://www.epa.gov/waterscience/fishstudy/.
National GAP Forum Attracts 280 - televised by C-Span
Calling national attention to future investment gaps facing the nation's drinking water and wastewater infrastructure, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency hosted its first ever conference on "Closing the Gap: Innovative Solutions for America's Water Infrastructure" on Friday. The conference provided a national stage for business, government and other experts to exchange information and views on meeting future challenges in water infrastructure management and investment.
Assuming no growth in revenues, the total need for drinking water and wastewater infrastructure – in both capital and operations and maintenance – exceeds $540 billion over 20 years. The size of the gap can be reduced substantially if a real growth in revenues is projected over the same period. Assuming a three percent annual real growth in revenues, for example, the gap shrinks by nearly 85 percent.
EPA's Assistant Administrator for Water, G. Tracy Mehan III, offered a multifaceted approach to solving the problem including better management, smart water use, the watershed approach and better utilization of price mechanisms. "We are working to ensure clean and safe water for the 21st Century," said Mehan. "This is a concerted effort to close the gap in America's investment in our water infrastructure."
The national forum featured the following experts:
Andrew Chapman, Elizabethtown Water Company
Chuck Clarke, Seattle Public Utilities
Harry Ott, The Coca Cola Company
Paul Pinault, Narragansett Bay Commission
Richard Pinkham, Rocky Mountain Institute
Michael Rouse, International Water Association
Janice Beecher, Michigan State University Institute of Public Utilities
John Betkoski, Connecticut Department of Public Utility Control
Michael Chesser, United Water
Paul Halberstadt, ConAgra Foods
Eric Olson, Natural Resources Defense Council
Billy Turner, Columbus Water Works
Kevin Ward, Texas Water Development Board
To Read Assistant Administrator Mehan’s speech
http://www.epa.gov/water/speeches/sustaining.html
The Detroit News Editorial - “EPA Offers A Good Plan for Water Clean-up”
The Detroit News
Editorial - February 3, 2003
Allowing polluters to swap credits will cleanse waterways and save businesses money
The Environmental Protection Agency has come up with a plan for cleaner water that will be good for everybody. The plan will hand local industries and municipal governments new flexibility to target their anti-pollution dollars most efficiently.
This will speed the pace of water clean-up across the country, including in Michigan, without imposing additional burdens on taxpayers or businesses.
The World Resource Institute, the environmental group whose study provided the blueprint for the agency's initiative, notes that the Environmental Protection Agency's "command-and-control" approach to water clean-up no longer works.
Under this old approach, the agency requires industrial and municipal facilities, the so-called point sources of pollution, to clean their waste water to an acceptable level before releasing it into the nation's waterways. This approach dramatically improved the water quality of lakes and rivers at first.
But forcing these sources to scrub the remaining traces of pollution from their releases is proving both expensive and ineffective. This is why, according to the institute, the pace of clean-up has declined – even reversed -- during the last decade, even though spending on clean water programs has grown.
This trend will not be reversed by even stricter controls over traditional polluters. Rather, it will require tackling other sources of water pollution, such as agricultural and storm water runoffs -- which are notoriously hard to pinpoint and therefore haven't been regulated.
But the Environmental Protection Agency's new program, which will allow various polluters to trade pollution credits, offers a mechanism for reducing pollution from these sources without more regulation.
Under this program, for instance, farmers, who can cut back polluted run offs from their land through fairly simple and inexpensive means could voluntarily do so in exchange for pollution credits from the agency. They could then sell these credits to traditional polluters who share their waterways and whose clean-up costs are higher. The credits will allow these traditional polluters to release more waste water -- while still decreasing overall levels of pollution and overall costs of clean-up.
For example, the World Resource Institute estimates that reducing phosphorous to acceptable levels in Saginaw Bay will cost $24 per pound through conventional regulations on industrial polluters -- but only $2.90 per pound through some form of trading, an annual savings of $6.41 million.
By this calculation, the total savings for Michigan to return all its 35 "impaired" waterways to health could well add up to millions of dollars. And the national savings, according to a study conducted by the Clinton EPA, could be anywhere from $658 million to $7.5 billion every year.
But the real beauty of the trading program is that it will strike a much better balance between environmental clean-up and economic growth. Right now, notes Dave Batchelor, a senior policy administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency, many factories deliberately operate at less than their full capacity for fear of exceeding their pollution limits. Pollution credits will give them more room to grow.
No doubt many hurdles will have to be overcome before the plan can be fully implemented. But the EPA is off to a good start. It deserves credit for creative thinking.
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