Cash-strapped city water systems are struggling to envision how they’ll pay to filter “forever chemicals” out of drinking water in light of an EPA rule that could be finalized as soon as March.
Municipal water systems have a few funding streams—including federal grant dollars and lawsuit settlement money—to tap into. But those sources don’t appear to be adequate, said Sean McGinnis, a partner at environmental consultancy CO2EFFICIENT.
The other, more direct, stream of funding is raising residents’ water bills.
“The last thing cities need is a hugely expensive unfunded mandate,” said Rochester, Minn., Mayor Kim Norton (D). “Don’t punish cities and the residents that live there for something that’s not our fault.”
The proposed regulation would require water systems to have the lowest feasible level of up to six per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), a group of chemicals linked to cancer and other health risks, in their water. Utilities will have three years to comply once the rule is finalized, which federal statute says must happen this year.
The Environmental Protection Agency will consider more than 120,000 public comments it has received since March 2023 when it issues the final rule after interagency review concludes, the agency said in a statement.
“This final rule is central to achieving the goals of President Biden’s plan to combat PFAS pollution and EPA’s PFAS Strategic Roadmap,” an EPA spokesperson said. Nearly half of US drinking water sources contain PFAS, a US Geological Survey study released in 2023 found.
‘State of Limited Resources’
The agency originally estimated compliance costs at $800 million nationally, but a study from global engineering firm Black & Veatch found those costs to exceed $3.8 billion, plus nearly $40 billion in capital costs for new filtration systems and other technology, said Chris Moody, regulatory technical manager at American Water Works Association, whose organization commissioned the report.
Rochester alone is facing up to $340 million in capital costs and up to $26 million for maintenance annually, Norton said. Settlement money has proven useful for states to clean up PFAS contamination, but for municipalities, similar lawsuit dollars are likely sliced too thin.
Roughly 12,000 public drinking water systems are set to receive a portion of a proposed
Norton says Rochester participated in the litigation, but when the amount is split between thousands of utilities, it “won’t even be a fraction of what we need.”
Others chose not to participate in the litigation to begin with. Lancaster, Pa., Mayor Danene Sorace (D) said she feared that accepting settlement dollars would hinder the city’s ability to pursue other funding methods once the EPA rule went into effect.
The EPA’s proposed regulations are especially difficult for Lancaster because the city is already paying to address other infrastructure problems, like replacing 40 miles of asbestos-cement pipes, Sorace said.
Lancaster is also an environmental justice community where 10-20% of households can’t reliably pay their monthly water bills, Sorace said. If rates rise again, it could create a housing issue, since the town condemns homes without running water, she said.
The 2021 infrastructure law allocated $10 billion for addressing PFAS in drinking water. But with compliance costs estimated at more than four times that amount, water systems like the system in Lancaster are flummoxed on how to proceed.
“We’re constantly in this state of limited resources,” Sorace said.
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