Drinking Water

Meeting federal drinking water standards is a major financial problem for about 50,000 small towns that account for 90 percent of the nation's drinking water. In 1986, Congress amended the Safe Drinking Water Act to increase the number of regulated contaminants and beef up the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) enforcement authority. EPA has since issued new regulations that have significantly increased the responsibilities involved in managing drinking water programs. States are experimenting with a variety of strategies to improve small water systems' compliance with the Safe Drinking Water Act. They are (1) exploring affordable, alternative treatment strategies; (2) testing creative ways to deliver technical and financial help to small systems; and (3) exploring options for restructuring small systems, such as consolidating nonviable small systems with viable ones. A number of barriers, however, are preventing the wider use of these strategies--particularly the sheer number of systems needing assistance. EPA needs to strengthen its efforts to help small communities use more cost-effective technologies to protect drinking water. Moreover, Congress and the administration need to examine the spiraling costs associated with the act's requirements. The addition of new requirements without a commensurate increase in resources has hobbled states' and communities' ability to comply with basic program requirements. This problem has disproportionately affected smaller communities because they generally lack the economies of scale to absorb additional costs. GAO summarized this report in testimony before Congress; see: Drinking Water: Combination of Strategies Needed to Bring Program Costs in Line With Resources, by Peter F. Guerrero, Director of Environmental Protection Issues, before the Subcommittee on the Environment, Energy, and Natural Resources, House Committee on Government Operations. GAO/T-RCED-94-152, Mar. 14, 1994 (18 pages).

GAO found that: (1) state efforts to improve small community water systems' compliance with safe drinking water standards include developing technology- and management-based alternative strategies, determining whether alternatives are cost-effective, testing ways to provide technical and financial assistance to small systems, and exploring small system restructuring options; (2) barriers that prevent states from using alternative strategies include the high cost and complexity of some treatment technologies and the lack of cost and performance data necessary to assess alternative technologies and identify nonviable water systems to ensure they comply with drinking water standards; (3) although EPA supports states' consolidation of nonviable water systems, its drinking water grant formula provides a disincentive for consolidating water systems; (4) EPA efforts to address the barriers include field testing alternative treatment technologies, improving state technical and managerial capabilities, revising state grant allocation methods, and recommending that states develop viability programs; and (5) EPA needs to revise its drinking water program priorities to emphasize the development and implementation of viability programs, work with Congress to ensure that its proposed requirement is accompanied by a realistic funding strategy, and eliminate disincentives for consolidating water systems.

Recommendations

Our recommendations from this work are listed below with a Contact for more information. Status will change from "In process" to "Open," "Closed - implemented," or "Closed - not implemented" based on our follow up work.

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