Chairman Crapo, thank you for holding this oversight hearing today. The Subcommittee's early focus in this 107th session of Congress on water infrastructure needs is timely and of vital importance to the nation's environment, economy and public health. This hearing along with tomarrow's focus on this topic in the U.S. House signals the importance Congress places in moving the discussion forward. This hearing is a crucial first step toward securing more dollars for critical drinking water and wastewater infrastructure needs.
Three Decades of Federal Water Investments Have Made a Difference Almost twenty-nine years ago Congress put a down payment on cleaning up America's water resources with the passage of the Clean Water Act's sewage construction grants program. Staunching the flow of direct discharges of untreated sewage into our nation's rivers, lakes and streams has been one of the best investments the American people ever made. The federal grants program, and now the Clean Water State Revolving Fund (CWSRF), have been integral to making the Clean Water Act one of the most successful laws on the books. Almost thirty years of investment, have been at the center of a remarkable water quality turn around. In 1972, it was estimated that American's could safely swim or fish in only 1/3 of our nation's waters. By the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Clean Water Act, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that the simple act of swimming or fishing could be done with a threat to our health in sixty percent of our waters.
Twenty-seven years ago Congress recognized that the nation's lakes, rivers and underground waters served a critical use not adequately addressed in the Clean Water Act -- as a source of potable drinking water. In passing the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974, Congress set up a framework which began to address key public health issues related to polluted drinking water sources. Five years ago, in 1996, Congress made a great stride forward in protecting drinking water by establishing for the first time a federal pool of money to help our states and local communities meet the burden of delivering clean, safe, and affordable drinking water. With the establishment of the Drinking Water State Revolving Fund (DWSRF), Congress recognized a federal responsibility to partner with ratepayers and local and state governments to meet the increasing challenges and needs in the drinking water arena. Millions of citizens have been touched by this act of federal support and are now drinking cleaner more health protective, and affordable water as a result of this new program.
The Funding Gap is Large; New Federal Investments Are Needed We as a nation are proud of the progress that has been made in protecting America's water resources and public health. In the main we are going in the right direction. But there are some bumps on the road and there is more work to be done. Clean Water Action joined with the Water Infrastructure Network (WIN) this February in endorsing the call for Congress to set aside an additional $57 billion dollars over the next five years. Our alliance with Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA), the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) and the Western Coalition of Arid States (WestCAS) is not one that we entered into easily. Over the years Clean Water Action, AMSA and NRWA have found ourselves on opposite sides of critical Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act issues. And this year we find ourselves in disagreeing with WestCAS over how health protective the arsenic standard will be. But despite these differences, what brings us together today is that, we all agree that there is a huge gap between the total dollars being raised and spent, and the investments that are needed.
Congress has heard and will continue to hear a steady, almost unremitting drumbeat of information about the funding gap between drinking water and wastewater investment needs and available resources. The specific overall dollar figure may vary somewhat depending on the specific frame, model or method used to generate the numbers, but all agree that without significant new investment, we face some sobering environmental, public health and economic issues. Clean Water Action has taken a careful look at the WIN assumptions, the new 1999 USEPA "Drinking Water Infrastructure Survey," various other EPA white papers, and has concluded that however the number is sliced up, there exists a yawning chasm, a palpable gap between all funding sources and the serious commitment of resources that will be needed to deal with core water infrastructure needs.
It is Clean Water Action's position that the yearly $3 billion currently in the Drinking Water SRF and Clean Water SRF accounts for the states each year (combined with state matches, leveraging, mounting built state SRF reserves, and other sources of federal water infrastructure funding), is significant -- but is unfortunately an order of magnitude too low. For a variety of reasons there has been an under investment in water infrastructure at all levels of government and by our private markets as well. All stakeholders stipulate to this simple fact. We need Congress to approach its investment in water infrastructure and protecting public health with as much enthusiasm and commitment as Congress has provided for our other important infrastructure, our bridges and highways and airports. Clean Water Action calls on Congress to fully fund the additional $57 billion dollar proposal for the next five years and to begin the process of looking into solutions for the long-term.
Its worth noting that important organizations in addition to those backing the WIN report (the H2O Coalition, ASWIPCA, ASDWA and others) agree with its fundamental premise -- the need for more investment in critical infrastructure funding. One way or another, ratepayers, taxpayers, and large users of water resources and water infrastructure will have to pay more, a lot more over time. Investing now will save money and yield immediate economic and health benefits.
The key question is how do we act in a way that invokes, to the maximum extent possible, equity, affordability, and sustainability while meeting the triune goals of preserving the environment, enhancing the public's health and laying a new foundation for broad economic prosperity. How Congress disposes of this question is why Clean Water Action is at this table. We do not want this process to devolve into narrow interests fighting over turf. We are concerned about the possibility that this process might be used as a way to revisit important but contentious Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act reauthorization issues. Our approach, and we hope your approach, is to stick narrowly to the issues before us -- to define what the needs are and to figure out how best we can collectively structure a new water infrastructure funding paradigm which meets the criteria and goals enumerated in the attached statement of Principles.
Clean Water Action along with its partners in the Campaign for Safe and Affordable Drinking Water and the Clean Water Network has worked out a set of common sense principles and criteria for water infrastructure funding. It is our belief that if these principles and criteria are judiciously applied to any approach that we will have set in motion a process that will bring our water infrastructure from its mostly pre-WWI technology and state of general decay into the 21st century. We have a lot of catching up to do.
Give States Flexibility To Invest In Green Infrastructure As Well As Traditional Infrastructure Needs We strongly urge a focus by Congress on funding pressing current core needs. Heretofore, 98 % of water infrastructure funding has gone to brick and mortar projects. But we also need to support those pollution prevention that enhance the performance and cost effectiveness of needed traditional infrastructure investments. We need to give the states the flexibility to invest in pollution prevention as well as basic infrastructure needs. These core infrastructure needs can be mitigated by putting an emphasis on funding a combination of cost-effective, non-structural, preventive projects (green infrastructure), with innovative and alternative appropriate engineering strategies. When joined with needed modernization of old, decaying and out of date treatment plants, and collection and distribution systems we will finally lay the foundation that will forestall the need for even more costly approaches and investments in the near future.
Dollars for Cleanup, Not Sprawl Development or Environmentally Destructive Projects While Clean Water Action generally supports funding to address existing wastewater and drinking water needs we oppose using scarce federal dollars to subsidize systems which support new sprawl development. Core water infrastructure, most of which were built using taxpayer funds, are now in need of rehabilitation, replacement and repair. As we have said before, this is an investment in the future worth making to ensure that our lakes and streams are safe and support revitalization of our waterfronts and to provide safe drinking water throughout America. On the other hand funding should not be used to subsidize new systems (unless it can be shown that the new system would simply serve existing populations -- new capacity should not be subsidized).
In addition environmentally sound principles for project design and siting should be observed. In many cases state NEPA--like procedures are not followed or do not include any real review by the public. With little oversight by USEPA and almost no public involvement in the intended use plans (IUPs) there is very little indication whether or not federal dollars are supporting real public health, compliance or environmental needs. Effective public participation is the best way to ensure that environmental and fiscally sound choices are made. Ensuring such participation is the best way for Congress to protect and build support for its clean safe water investment.
Ratepayer and Taxpayer Protections Supported by Fiscally Conservative Approaches and Utilizing Market Based Incentives Clean Water Action supports five fiscally conservative spending parameters which will in the end constrain the federal dollars to flow most efficiently to solutions, instead of creating additional and more costly problems. We support:
1) providing flexibility and incentives to states/communities to invest in green infrastructure solutions that achieve the compatible ends (e.g. source water protections such as land acquisitions, source control water methods of water treatment, such as using rain gardens, stream buffers and water conservation and reuse) and make core "hardware" investments more cost-effective;
2) fiscal accountability through the integration of meaningful public comment into priority setting, and clear publicly disseminated national tracking priorities, project purposes and expenditures;
3) limiting federal investment to those facilities that have the financial, technical and managerial capacity to ensure compliance. Facilities which are in significant non-compliance, should only be allowed funding to restructure or consolidate to achieve compliance or where consolidation or restructuring is impossible, if the facility has made a good faith effort to comply and the facility is adhering to an enforceable compliance schedule, and the funding is necessary to avoid making water or sewer unaffordable to a significant portion of the facility's retail customers;
4) requiring a local match for any grant program that is layered on top of te existing SRF accounts. There is no need to encourage "gold plating" of projects when money is so scarce. "Free" money without a buy in from the local community is a prescription for throwing money away. The percentage of the required local match would be tied to an affordability index;
5) protecting taxpayers and ratepayers by ensuring that costs are fairly apportioned between all users of water resources, not just residential consumers. There is already a powerful mechanism in place for making market forces part of the equation for getting cleaner and safer water: fees charged for federal permits that allow discharges into treatment plants and waterways; but, the potential is barely tapped. Permits are free or almost free in many cases, but a simple switch to volume/toxicity based fees could yield billions in revenue (that could be used to reduce the amounts taxpayers must pay) and provided a market incentives for effluent reductions.
One concern which makes Clean Water Action and WIN's call for increased water infrastructure funding very urgent and clearly marked as a federal concern, is the growing permanence of a two tier water infrastructure picture across the country. Big cities which have lost much of their rate base while their infrastructure grows beyond its useful life and small systems that lack the necessary scale to spread out costs to install or maintain new technologies are threatened to be left behind. Not only are millions of people's health on the line, but the basic economy's of many cities and whole regions of the country are put at risk.
Fund Safe and Affordable Water For Small Communities Clean Water Action believes that it should be made mandatory that priority be given to projects that help systems/communities with the greatest need based on affordability criteria. An example of this need can be seen in all the small communities where millions of American's are currently drinking water with significant amounts of arsenic. The conundrum is clear, either we can help these communities with the necessary funding and technical innovation support or we can bury our collective heads in the sand and just shift the standard until we ensure that most communities are in compliance. And the fact is that in Fallon, Nevada and in small communities like Fallon across the country, no matter how un-health protective the final arsenic standard is set, Fallon will still have to get the arsenic out of its water. That is why Clean Water Action supports efforts such as the Reid/Ensign Small Communities Safe Drinking Water Infrastructure Funding Act, S 503.
One of the WIN proposals that Clean Water Action is especially delighted by is the call for Congress to authorize $250 million a year to support an Institute of Technology and Management Excellence. The Institute would bring to bear the best thinking regarding cost-effective green infrastructure and promote the development and use of best management practices, innovative technologies to meet drinking water, wet weather, and wastewater goals. Clean Water Action would further recommend that the Institute nurture broad public participation in the development of its research, science and technology and best management practices agenda. Stakeholders beyond the utility community should have an integral role in helping to move this exciting project forward.
As you consider the myriad of policy options and funding levels, know that the American public is fully behind your effort to address this pressing problem. Clean Water Action supports the WIN approach, and is open to addressing your concerns. We are heartened by Senator Voinovich's Clean Water SRF funding bill and by the analogous approach by Reps. Kelly and Tauscher in the House. The emergence of the Water Infrastructure Caucus and the hearings today and tomarrow are most encouraging. Let's keep the bipartisan and interest group comity and pursue water infrastructure solutions that lay the foundation for the next century to come.
Thank you for the opportunity to comment. I would be happy to entertain any question or concern.