Toward Cleaner Water

At long last, the California Legislature passed protections for drinking water after environmentalists and the state’s major water utilities, long-time antagonists over how best to do the job, reached agreement. Now it’s up to Gov. George Deukmejian.

The legislation would put into law a two-tier process under which water utilities would have to meet certain drinking-water standards to protect the public against contaminants while the utilities also tried to achieve goals that would provide even better protection. If the water utilities couldn’t meet the tougher health-based goals, the public would be notified and the state would then rule on whether the utilities presented a reasonable case. If the utilities couldn’t make their case, the state by law would have to order them to meet the goals. That sounds toothless, but legislators and utilities alike say that they consider avoiding that public a showdown a powerful incentive toward progress.

Everybody gave up something to achieve this compromise. Everybody but some agricultural interests. In a letter to the governor, Dan Smith of the Assn. of California Water Agencies called the bill a “big hammer” that would be used for other environmental standards. Smith said that the measure “misrepresents itself and will result in water agencies and ultimately water consumers paying billions of dollars to obtain objectives that probably will have little in the way of significant benefit.”

Major water utilities say that they wouldn’t have agreed to the compromise if they thought that it would have that price tag. Even without this bill, water utilities of all sizes will be required by federal legislation to make major expenditures over the next five to seven years. The Assn. of California Water Agencies has confused the issues and is attributing extraordinary costs to this bill that aren’t there.

The opponents are raising the red flags of higher costs and excessive governmental intrusion to get the governor’s attention. We trust that Deukmejian will look beyond these ploys and help the state meet its responsibility of providing safe and affordable drinking water.