White House Says, 'Let's Have More Arsenic in Drinking Water' - Environment - RegWatch

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Sunday, April 02, 2006

White House Says, 'Let's Have More Arsenic in Drinking Water'

You might have read in the news about an EPA plan to make it easier for drinking water systems to reduce the quality of your drinking water, even when it comes to such hazards as arsenic, radon, and lead. What hasn't been reported is that the push for the policy came from the White House itself.

The White House released a report in 2004 that invited industry to nominate regulatory protections to be weakened or eliminated, and in that report OMB offered its own list of rollbacks. One of the rollback demands on the White House's own hit list was a call for EPA to be looser with its Safe Drinking Water Act authority to grant "economically disadvantaged drinking water systems" variances from safe drinking water standards.

After all, god forbid that poor communities be entitled to the same level of safe drinking water that everyone else enjoys.

Now EPA has bent to OMB's will. A March 2 Federal Register entry that proposes allowing small drinking water systems to serve us water with up to three times the maximum contaminant levels! The standard of affordability that would open the way to variances would also change: the proposed rule would count spending as little as $100 per year (which NRDC notes is a mere 0.25% of median household incomes) on drinking water as unaffordable.

Here's a tasty example: if your drinking water system (which may be owned by a distant corporation rather than your local government) has arsenic in the water at 29 parts per billion -- well over the standard of 10 parts per billion that the Bush administration threatened to roll back until the public cried out -- it can be considered safe.