SOURCE:
https://www.newsday.com/opinion/newsday-opinion-the-point-newsletter-1.36828246
September 25, 2019
The plan proposed this week by the Suffolk County Water Authority to install more treatment systems to get 1,4-dioxane out of drinking water — at a cost of $75 million to $600 million, depending on how many wells are treated — highlighted a couple problems.
The first is that more state funding for water treatment technology is going to be needed. In the last few years, the state budget has included a total of $3 billion for clean water initiatives in general over five years with a promise — but not an allocation — for another $500 million next year.
“It’s not enough. We’ll be going back this year and asking for more,” Citizens Campaign for the Environment executive director Adrienne Esposito told The Point. “Increased funding means quicker implementation of filtration systems.”
The second issue is potentially dicier. Water authority officials said they likely will seek a rate increase to treat 1,4-dioxane, as well as perfluorinated compounds. But clean water advocates have been pushing for several years for a fee on water to attack nitrogen pollution, a cause which has not been warmly received by Suffolk County Water Authority leaders. The plan embraced by the advocates calls for a public referendum asking voters whether they are willing to pay a fee to get nitrogen out of groundwater and drinking water.
The water authority’s plan, environmentalists admit, makes the referendum push a little more difficult because voters might be more reluctant to approve a new nitrogen fee on top of a 1,4-dioxane fee.
One clean water advocate even wondered whether the water authority was trying to “intentionally crowd out” any other attempts to add a water fee. Esposito said a fee on water could be allocated to fight both emerging contaminants like 1,4-dioxane and nitrogen since the public expects water that is clean, safe and free of both potential carcinogens and nitrogen.
“We can tackle both things and the water districts need to understand both things need to be tackled,” she said. “We can’t pit one pollution source against another pollution source, that’s not good public health policy.”
But some might think it’s good politics. And that’s never water under the bridge.
