The Administrative Presidency and the Environment: Policy Leadership and Retrenchment From Clinton to Trump by David M. Shafie

Author:David M. Shafie [Shafie, David M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Leadership, Public Affairs & Administration, Political Science, Political Process, Environmental Policy
ISBN: 9780429487927
Google: 1Y5VzQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 51635861
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2020-01-15T06:12:51+00:00

Drinking Water

In 2015, the year unsafe levels of lead were discovered in Flint’s tap water, there were approximately 18 million people nationwide who purchased their water from systems that violated the EPA’s Lead and Copper Rule. Altogether, there were 18,000 community water systems with at least one violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act. These include violations of health standards, violations of testing requirements, and failures to report violations of health standards.73 The chemical and microbial contaminants found in drinking water are largely invisible, and unlike air quality, the quality of drinking water is often unknown to the public. Since few citizens have the expertise to assess the health risk from their drinking water on their own, the debate relies on competing claims by scientists, regulators and interest groups. This is especially confounding when it comes to natural contaminants such as arsenic and radon. When people consider the quality of their drinking water, they tend to think about industrial and organic pollutants. As difficult as they are to detect, pollutants such as lead and mercury are commonly understood to be the byproducts of industrial pollution and improperly treated wastewater.

A decade after the SDWA was enacted, Congress was frustrated with the EPA’s plodding pace and amended the law in 1986 to include hammer clauses requiring that the agency issue or revise standards for 83 specific contaminants by 1989, and another 25 new contaminants every three years. The EPA missed its deadline for all but a handful of the required standards and lagged behind on rulemaking for many of the required pollutants, including chlorine disinfection byproducts, arsenic, and radon. Following the election of 1992, those standards still had not been approved, and Congress began to consider new drinking water legislation. When the 103rd Congress deadlocked over the new drinking water bill, it became one of the initiatives that fell by the wayside before the 1994 election.

When the SDWA was amended again in 1996, the law reflected priorities of the new Republican majority as well as President Clinton. The 1996 SDWA Amendments featured innovative provisions, including the use of information as a regulatory tool. Clinton became an advocate for a right-to-know provision, modeled after the Toxic Release Inventory (see Chapter 5). It required water systems to send their customers annual reports listing what pollutants were found, their potential health effects, and whether any federal water standards were violated. The provision had been stripped from a senate version of the bill in 1995 after heavy opposition from water companies, state and local governments, but restored when the bill was reintroduced.74 Clinton also supported a requirement in the bill that residents receive 24-hour notice when dangerous contaminants are discovered, and another provision creating an online database of water quality data for all 2,110 watersheds, searchable by zip code (“Surf your shed”). The legislation also created a revolving loan fund, modeled after the Clean Water State Revolving Fund, in order to upgrade community water systems.

Congress rescinded the requirement that 25 new contaminants be regulated every three

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