A Pint of Prevention

In their end-of-session rush, state legislators should take care to let a modest ground water bill bubble to the surface.

The measure, AB 599, by Assembly member Carol Liu (D-La Canada Flintridge), would allow state officials to accurately track ground water contamination. Half the state’s residents depend on ground water--pumped from springs or wells--for part or all of their drinking water. California uses more ground water than any other state, an average of 14.5 billion gallons every day.

Recent reports that some underground supplies are contaminated with chromium 6, arsenic or the gasoline additive MTBE emphasize the need for comprehensive water quality testing and monitoring. Yet, there is no one source that health officials or the public can turn to for comprehensive and reliable data on the status of underground water supplies. Instead, a patchwork of state and federal rules seriously impedes California’s ability to track and clean up fouled aquifers.

Liu’s bill would require the state to design a comprehensive monitoring plan for all ground water basins, a kind of early-warning system to alert officials to possible contamination. A newly formed task force would coordinate the information from that system with the hodgepodge of data already collected by six separate federal and state agencies, each for its own narrow purposes.

Finally, the task force would make everything publicly available and present a plan to the Legislature for cleaning up what the bill’s supporters call “widespread and serious” contamination.

AB 599 has already passed the Assembly and is before the full Senate in the final days of the legislative session. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and California’s Water Resources Control Board support the measure. Relatively minor amendments have prompted groups that had earlier opposed it, including the state Milk Producers Council and the California Manufacturers Assn., to now take a neutral position.

The price tag for Liu’s bill, an estimated $350,000 for the task force to design the monitoring program, puts this measure squarely in the “ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” category.