Editor’s note: This commentary is by Page Guertin, of Montpelier, who is part of the Vermont Clean Water Coalition.
[P]rotection of surface sources of drinking water is serious business in most New England states and New York. The laws vary widely, and may be administered by the state, community or water utility, but in almost every state, swimming and body contact in water supply sources are prohibited or restricted. Other recreation is banned or limited largely depending on the size of the water source. Water authorities such as the New England Water Works Association clearly discourage any body-contact recreation in drinking water supply ponds and lakes, and suggest careful monitoring of any boating activity to prevent contamination of water sources by invasive species and other sources.
Most New England states are working to follow these guidelines, and to manage the risk of water contamination by exercising caution. They recognize that there is conflict between safe drinking water and recreation, and attempt to balance those competing interests in a thoughtful manner, with drinking water safety a top concern. They have responded to new human-carried threats that have arisen in the past 20-30 years: invasive species such as Eurasian milfoil and zebra mussels that wreak havoc on water treatment systems and pond ecology, and new pathogens, especially the nasty protozoan cryptosporidium, which is so dangerous that the EPA has developed a special rule designed to deal primarily with that organism.
Vermont is the exception. Vermont’s regulations treat water supply ponds like any other water body. State statute holds that fishing, boating and swimming are compatible with public water supply as uses of our lakes and ponds. Eleven municipalities, including Barre, St. Johnsbury, St. Albans, Brattleboro and Montpelier (almost 10 percent of the state’s population) use ponds (less than 2 percent of them) as the source of their public water supply. Other communities use streams. For many years the state Department of Health oversaw drinking water safety, and each municipality protected its own water source. In 1991, however, the Legislature transferred control of the state’s drinking water supply program to the Agency of Natural Resources (ANR), which also oversees hunting and fishing – arguably an inherent conflict of interest.
Since then, pressure has been building to challenge the municipalities’ protections and open the water supply ponds to recreation. After a lawsuit led to the Supreme Court ruling that one particular municipality did not have legal authority over its water source (after an unfortunate tangle of legal changes with unforeseen consequences), ANR opened that pond to recreation. That led at least two other communities to open or partially open their water sources to recreation, believing that they had no option.
ANR has stated that they are “obligated” to open all the other water supply ponds as well. They say that the risk is “negligible,” and no management is needed. Their policy is, “If there’s a problem, we’ll deal with it.” This has left the opened ponds in a weird limbo: the state has no funds to provide monitoring of recreational use of the ponds, and the municipalities have no authority there. So the drinking water for those communities is at increased risk for contamination and no one is watching.
Why is Vermont, supposedly the “green” state, so out of sync with our neighbors in the area of drinking water protection? Why are we reactive, while the other states are proactive in managing the risk of drinking water contamination?
Why is Vermont, supposedly the “green” state, so out of sync with our neighbors in the area of drinking water protection? Why are we reactive, while the other states are proactive in managing the risk of drinking water contamination? How many negligible risks does it take to create a significant risk?
In testimony, a spokesperson for ANR, who lives in one of the communities whose water supply source is now open to recreation, was asked if he was hesitant to drink the water. He responded with a “no,” but then, after a slight pause, he added: “I would say, just as an aside, that for drinking water risks of the kind that we’re talking about, it would be people who had kind of impaired immune systems, very young, very old or people who were suffering immunological diseases and so forth. But it wouldn’t be healthy adults like myself.”
Are the young, the old, and those with compromised immune systems simply immaterial?
In addition to the threat of water contamination, it’s very probable that water treatment costs will escalate, perhaps dramatically. One of the affected towns has already reported increased chemical use and more frequent need for backflushing (cleaning) of filters at its water treatment plant – both of which are additional costs to the municipality’s taxpayers. While there is no absolute proof that those issues are related to the recreational use of the water source, the timing of their occurrence is suggestive. EPA’s rule regarding cryptosporidium will require new testing and, if the pathogen is found, some pretty extreme additional treatment methods, since chlorine is ineffective against crypto. These new methods will create additional infrastructure and processing expense. The state may make the rules, but the municipalities foot the bill.
In the last legislative session, a bill was introduced (H.33) which proposed to grant authority over their water supply sources to the municipalities that use them. The bill died in committee, but it may be reconsidered. In addition, some of the municipalities will seek charter changes to solidify the authority they thought they had over their water sources. This is the first of several informational commentaries around this issue, with the goal of making sure the public and the Legislature have facts and understand the implications of action or inaction. Future pieces will cover:
• details about what other states are doing,
• the specific threats to drinking water quality,
• costs vs. benefits of opening the ponds and who pays,
• source protection plans,
• how water treatment plants work,
• Vermont’s legal framework around water sources and how it has been administered, and
• the new EPA rule on cryptosporidium.
While we are not advocating either closing or opening the ponds which provide public water supplies, we do believe that the municipalities, whose populations drink the water and pay for treatment, testing and monitoring, should have authority over the water itself, as they are the ones who gain or lose by the choices made concerning management of that resource. Anyone with information about this issue can contact the Vermont Clean Water Coalition at vcwcvt@gmail.com.
