Ground Water and Drinking Water

Drinking Water Action Plan: Priority Area 2

Advance Next Generation Oversight for the Safe Drinking Water Act


Goals

To work together with regulators, utilities and a broad cross section of stakeholders to better leverage the power of information – to ensure timely identification of problems, efficient use of oversight and technical assistance resources, promote quicker mitigation of problems and robust public accountability for utilities and regulators.

Challenges

  • Safe drinking water requires effective oversight of over 150,000 public water systems across the country – at the level of state and tribal primacy agencies and at the federal level.
  • In addition to the challenge of working to ensure simultaneous compliance with over 90 NPDWRs for 150,000 public water systems nationwide, regulators are facing increasing challenges associated with unregulated contaminants, aging infrastructure, and extreme weather impacts with limited and often declining resources, and recent events have eroded public confidence.

Proposed Actions

  • Develop a national e-reporting rule under SDWA to require water utilities and states to report SDWA compliance data electronically.
  • Implement the Compliance Monitoring Data Portal (CMDP), a compliance monitoring and analysis tool that facilitates electronic reporting.
  • Publish regular, triennial on-site reviews of primacy agency drinking water programs.
  • Develop priority indicators for troubled drinking water systems that can be used to best focus primacy agency and EPA oversight resources and technical assistance on troubled systems.
  • Collaborate with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, primacy agencies, and the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials, to support local efforts to integrate public health surveillance data (such as childhood blood lead levels) with community drinking water quality data.
  • Promote Use of Advanced Monitoring Technology and Citizen Science.

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