Costs Challenge Drinking Water Plans In Small Communities

A tiny town in Minnesota is facing severe nitrate contamination of drinking water.

The town of Coates, which has a population around 160, may have to hook up to city water in nearby Rosemount due to the fact that up to 55 percent of private wells in Coates may have high nitrate levels, according to The Star Tribune.

But connecting to Rosemount’s water lines could be challenging. Rosemount Mayor Bill Droste discussed the prospect with The Star Tribune.

“Rosemount has a water storage tank north of Coates and a pipe that runs along Hwy. 52 south to the city limits, but the pipe is too narrow and doesn’t meet existing standards,” the report stated.

Linking up to a larger water system is an idea that Coates residents have considered in the past. But they saw it as too expensive, the report said.

Funding is a major hurdle to this solution. The funding problems in Coates mirror challenges in small communities across the country.

A lack of water infrastructure funding in small and rural communities breeds health challenges.

“Of the 5,000 drinking-water systems that racked up health-based violations in 2015, more than 50 percent were systems that serve 500 people or fewer. In those small areas, who is going to raise hell except for the people affected and maybe the local paper?” The New Republic reported.

“From Appalachian Kentucky to the Texas borderlands, millions of rural Americans are subject to unhealthy and sometimes illegal levels of contaminants in their drinking water, whether from agriculture, or coal, or plain old bad pipes. And as the economic gap separating rural America from its urban and suburban counterparts continues to grow, this basic inequality is set to become more entrenched — and possibly more dangerous, as sickness seeps into rural America,” the report stated.

Nitrates are an issue in Coates because it is located in a county where farming is prevalent.

“As farmers do almost everywhere, Dakota County growers apply nitrogen fertilizer and herbicides to crops, some of which soak into aquifers below. But the area’s geology makes wells especially vulnerable to contamination, since water quickly trickles through the sandy soil and fractured limestone. Pesticides of the past can linger in the groundwater,” The Star Tribune reported.

Influential water utility managers have expressed frustration that water utilities, rather than farmers, end up shouldering the cost burden of nitrate removal from drinking water.

Des Moines Water Works, for instance, brought a lawsuit against agricultural drainage districts in attempt to hold farming interests accountable for the steep price of treating nutrient pollution, but the utility lost in court.