PA Considers Water System Fee Increase To Address Safety Issues
By Peak Johnson
During a recent press conference, Patrick McDonnell, acting secretary for Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), said that the agency is considering a fee increase for public water supply systems.
According to the Pittsburgh Post- Gazette, McDonnell endured questions from state House Appropriations Committee focused on how the agency will ultimately fix the water drinking program. The fee increase is designed to raise an extra $7.5 million for the state’s safe water drinking program.
The increase would “fund an additional 33 positions to bring the workload down to between 120 and 125 water systems overseen by each inspector.” At the moment, “each DEP inspector in the program oversees 149 public water systems — a workload that Mr. McDonnell said is more than double the national average.”
In late December, the U.S. EPA sent a letter obtained by the Gazette detailing its concerns “with the state drinking water program’s excessive workload, declining inspection rate and rising number of unaddressed violations.”
The DEP “collects less than $172,000 a year in permit fees from the state’s public water supply systems.”
According to a draft of its proposal, the agency expects that fees would raise from 35 cents to $10 per person a year. The exact figure would depend on the size of the water system in a given community.
“The acute public health impacts specifically within the drinking water program are job one for us,” McDonnell was quoted telling lawmakers per State Impact
Because of a lack of resources, according to the EPA’s letter, there have been a variety of unaddressed Safe Drinking Water Act violations in Pennsylvania that have doubled in the past five years, reaching a total of almost 8,000.
Over the last 20 years, “the department has seen its appropriations from the state’s general fund consistently cut, and McDonnell noted the drinking water program has taken the biggest hit.”
“When you cut the general fund for the agency, you’re not cutting the general fund for the agency,” McDonnell said. “For example, our air program is basically 100 percent funded by fees, fines and penalties… The area of the department that was most impacted by general fund cuts has been water.”
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