Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 17, 1992 TAG: 9201170542
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-10 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
STATE MUST ACT
THE COMMONWEALTH has scrambled mightily to defer certain needs and to avoid digging deeper into Virginians' pockets. Some things can't be put off much longer; one of them is drinking-water safety.Virginia has more than 1,600 municipal and private waterworks. There are a few good-sized ones, like Roanoke's. There are many more small ones (240 serve 501 to 3,300 customers) and very small ones (1,200 serve fewer than 500 customers). All of them must measure up to certain standards of safety in the next few years. And that will cost money, a lot of it.
The minimum standards are federal, authorized by Congress and written by the Environmental Protection Agency. Virginia can keep the feds' hands off if it enforces drinking-water standards at least as strict as the federal, and does so uniformly across the state.
That responsibility is called primacy, and everyone - including EPA - wants it to stay with the state government. But that requires state action.
Primacy has been exercised by the Virginia Department of Health. The agency estimates that just to administer new standards and give technical assistance to the 1,600 waterworks will cost more than $4 million a year. Cost of construction and other improvements needed for those systems to meet the standards is estimated at more than $1.6 billion through the year 2000.
Where's the money to come from?
The general fund is one possibility; but without tax increases, the money's not there. Alternatives outlined to the Senate Finance and House Appropriations committees include user fees, a sales tax on water, a tax on water utilities, and various fees that would be charged to waterworks.
If the general fund's tapped out, the money for all this would, in some fashion, have to come from water customers. That might be all right for the big systems; most small ones, however, have too few users to take that route. And some of the big systems already object to the idea of underwriting improvements for smaller systems that might be inefficiently run.
Del. Lewis Parker, D-South Hill, introduced a bill in 1990 (not acted on) to provide for a user fee of 10 cents per 1,000 gallons. Proceeds, about $20 million a year, would be used for technical assistance; hardship grants for small water systems that can't generate enough of their own revenue; and a revolving loan fund for waterworks.
A variation proposed by the Virginia Water Project would use a sliding scale according to size of water system and per-capita income of customers; it would raise about $12.8 million for the revolving fund and cost only about $9 per household per year.
A case can be made for financing the expanded program from general revenues. Safe drinking water is basic. Everyone needs it; some would argue everyone should share, via broad-based taxes, in assuring availability of this ingredient of public health.
But a good case can also be made for a user-fee structure such as one of those outlined above. "In Virginia," says the Virginia Water Project's Chuck George, "we don't yet pay the real cost of our drinking water."
When something comes cheaply, (1) it will be used wastefully, and (2) users will complain bitterly if the price increases to anything commensurate with the commodity's actual cost. Good enough. All of us need to learn more of the economic realities we've been shielded from. We need safe drinking water. We should be willing to pay more for it, even if that means helping out a few users who are hard up.