A version of this story by Manny Teodoro was published in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Ideas Lab as part of the Main Street Agenda.
On December 16, 1974, President Gerald Ford signed into law the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Fifty years later, it remains one of America’s most important environmental laws and most effective public health regulations.
It’s largely responsible for the U.S. ranking among the countries with the safest drinking water year after year. It’s also why, with a few notable exceptions, Americans in most communities across the country can confidently pull straight from the tap with little concern for what might be in their water supply.
While our drinking water is still the envy of most countries, the SDWA has not been a cure-all. More than two million Americans still lack access to clean drinking water at home and nearly one in four U.S. households on private wells have dangerous contaminants in their water. High-profile breakdowns in water infrastructure in long neglected communities like Flint, Michigan and Jackson, Mississippi have exposed socioeconomic and racial disparities in our water systems.
Increasing awareness of the more than 9 million (pdf) lead service lines still in use across the country has also chipped away at trust in our water. Underscoring the urgency of this matter, President Biden visited Milwaukee in October to announce his administration’s commitment to replace all lead pipes in the country by 2037. Milwaukee alone still has 65,000 lead service lines, easily the most in Wisconsin.
Maintaining safe drinking water is a particularly acute challenge in small towns and rural communities. America’s drinking water utilities are highly fragmented, with tens of thousands of independent community water systems across the country; there are more than 570 water utilities in Wisconsin alone. Most of these water systems are very small, and many lack the financial resources and organizational capacity to provide safe, affordable, and sustainable water service.
Aging infrastructure leaves our water supplies leaky and prone to main breaks (pdf) that threaten health and disrupt homes and businesses; Wisconsin’s water utilities repair an average of more than 3,000 main breaks each year. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that the nation’s water utilities will need more $625 billion to pay for pipe replacements, treatment plant upgrades, and other facilities to maintain safe drinking water.
The Madison Declaration
Against this backdrop, more than 50 leading water professionals and scholars came together this past week in Madison to envision the next fifty years of the SDWA. At that symposium, colleagues at the Water & Health Advisory Council and I formally unveiled our vision for the future of drinking water in America. In it we lay out principles to ensure public health, rebuild trust, and provide sustainable drinking water:
- Prioritizing risk. Regulators, utilities and policymakers must focus on the most serious threats to drinking water using the best available science on risks and benefits. Recently, regulators have prioritized identifying and regulating new contaminants over eliminating known risks and enforcing existing rules. Vigilance is important, but advancing public health requires concentrating on the most serious problems first.
- Building capacity. Water utilities need sustainable funding through service rates and other local sources. Federal funding can be a useful complement in some cases, but it shouldn’t be viewed as a main source of financial support. America’s fragmented drinking water systems must consolidate substantially to achieve the organizational scale needed to operate effectively and affordably.
- 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 apply to all public, private, and nonprofit water systems, as well as bottled and other commercial drinking water.
- Justice. Regulations 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. Regulation must evolve with the times to protect vulnerable populations as our economy and society evolves.
- 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.
Rebuilding trust
As pipes crumble, so does trust in tap water—along with trust in the institutions that provide and regulate this most essential service. Americans’ trust in institutions is at an all-time low; the meteoric rise of the bottled water industry is in part a sign of that declining trust in government.
Distrust in the government and concerns around transparency came up frequently in the Main Street Agenda community conversations that the La Follette School of Public Affairs conducted this fall. Oddly enough, the survey respondents from the project were not concerned about too much government regulation. This leads me to believe that public trust depends on effective implementation.
That’s why our vision emphasizes the basics and focuses on SDWA implementation. Sustaining the miracle of modern drinking water requires an ongoing commitment to the original intent of the legislation signed by President Ford fifty years ago. In the decades ahead we must rebuild the critical infrastructure that sustains our lives, our environment, and our economy. The SDWA can help get us there.
If we get it right, we’ll rebuild faith in democracy along the way.
What matters to Wisconsin
The La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel are collaborating to share insights on how Wisconsinites feel about important policy topics through a yearlong project called the Main Street Agenda. Each month, the La Follette School and the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel will feature a different policy topic, analyzing new statewide survey data to highlight what matters to Wisconsin. The WisconSays/La Follette Survey being used for the Main Street Agenda is a subset of the new WisconSays opinion panel based out of the UW-Madison Survey Center. There are more than 3,500 Wisconsinites enrolled in this representative panel.