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By Debbie Davis
Environmental Justice Coalition for Water

At first glance, you’d think the Human Right to Water bill package—now on Gov. Brown’s desk—makes all the self-evident sense in the world.

This package will help communities across California in their fight to have clean, affordable, and accessible water—for drinking, cooking, and sanitary purposes.

Sounds great, but didn’t we take care of that clean drinking water thing a long time ago?

Well, it depends on where you live.  For the 2 million Californians statewide, primarily in rural communities, who depend on groundwater wells for their drinking water, this package will begin to reverse decades of discrimination and neglect by making provision of safe, affordable water a statewide priority.

It’s time to give all Californians a fair deal when it comes to water, our most basic of needs, and ensure that everyone has access, no matter their color or income level.

So what’s not to like with this package?  Apparently, plenty.

A phalanx of agricultural and municipal water interests opposed Assembly Bill 685, the flagship bill of this package, including the California Farm Bureau Federation and the Association of California Water Agencies.  AB 685 would have made it the policy of the State of California that all residents have the right to pure, safe, and affordable water.  The bill failed to clear the Senate Appropriations Committee.

The organizations that opposed AB 685 are thriving, thanks to regular deliveries of clean water from state and federal water projects, whose canals and irrigation ditches often run right past the homes of residents who have no choice but to drink contaminated well water—and whose chemical crop treatments, leached into the soil by their irrigation water, are a major source of these communities’ contamination.

We find ourselves in the ironic position of arguing with a system in which powerful interests exploit public resources for private benefit, and when it comes to a time of crisis, they do not face the consequences of their actions, but leave it to the communities themselves to shoulder the burden of cleanup.

Rather than providing communities with clean water in the first place, we are essentially asking Californians to drink contaminated water and then dig into their own pockets to pay for the cleanup—as long as they’re not sickened, dead or disabled first.  Somehow that doesn’t seem fair. After all, they didn’t cause this contamination.

Agricultural interests are quick to roll out the embattled family farmer scenario when faced with the potential consequences of their actions.  But many of these interests are both corporate and absentee, reaping record profits from high commodity prices while reinvesting precious little in the local communities that make their wealth possible.

Although AB 685 did not pass the Legislature, four companion bills did.  They now await Gov. Brown’s signature.  These bills, while lacking the comprehensiveness of our flagship bill, will give communities the wherewithall to begin to clean up their water supplies:

SB 244 requires Local Agency Formation Commission’s (LAFCOs) and local governments to identify critical infrastructure needs, including domestic water, in periodic municipal service reviews, sphere of influence and annexation proposals, and local general plans of disadvantaged unincorporated communities;

AB 938 requires notices regarding drinking water contamination warnings be provided in English, Spanish, and any other language spoken by at least 10 percent of a water system’s customers, and requires abbreviated notices in languages spoken by at least 1,000 customers;

AB 983 makes several technical changes to allocating funds from the state’s Safe Drinking Water Revolving Fund, which generally come from federal funds or state bond revenues, to make it more likely that small disadvantaged communities can make important improvements to their drinking water quality;

AB 1221 authorizes non-profit organizations and tribal governments, representing disadvantaged low-income communities, to apply for grants from the state’s Cleanup and Abatement Account to pay for water pollution cleanup. These funds come from fines and penalties on polluters and are available when parties responsible for pollution cannot be identified.

The state can meet the safe clean water needs of all Californians. But  equitable resource management is key. . Actions like recharging groundwater aquifers, conservation, protecting supplies from further contamination, and putting available water to appropriate uses—such as using fertilizer-laden groundwater, instead of high-quality surface water, to irrigate fields—would cover all of California’s water needs.

California, even in these difficult economic times, can afford to do this. The best estimate is that it will cost about $2 billion to get all Californians access to safe, affordable water. Sounds like a high price tag, but it is small compared to the billions we have already spent on water in California.

This amount is further dwarfed by the $11.14 billion water bond slated to appear on the 2012 ballot. Less than 2 percent of the funds to be expended in that bond is guaranteed to make it to the communities that need access to safe affordable water the most. Those kinds of statewide priorities are the problem, if you ask me.

According to the United Nations for every $1 invested in the provision of safe, affordable water there is an approximately $8 return on investment.

Please contact Gov. Brown’s office and urge him to sign the Human Right to Water package.  Its passage will help all of us get clean, safe water from our taps.  I think that makes a lot of sense.

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Debbie Davis is Policy Director of the Environmental Justice Coalition for Water.