California’s state auditor blasted the agency responsible for helping poor communities fix their tainted water systems Tuesday, saying the it has tied up the process in red tape and forced nearly 1 million residents to wait months or years for help.
Acting State Auditor Michael Tilden said the State Water Resources Control Board takes an average of 33 months to approve grants and loans requested by these communities to clean up water systems contaminated by excess amounts of nitrate, arsenic and other dangerous chemicals. Four years ago, the process took half as long.
The board has issued $1.7 billion in grants and loans in the past five years, the audit said.
Tilden’s report highlights a chronic problem afflicting hundreds of small, mostly rural communities in California, mainly in the Central Valley — a shortage of safe drinking water. The Sacramento Bee reported in 2018 that tens of thousands of Californians were stuck with contaminated, unhealthy supplies. Often, their communities have to resort to distributing bottled water during the wait for repairs to the system.
The auditor noted that the problem gets worse with drought. Groundwater levels sink, and hazardous farm chemicals seep deeper into the soil and taint the underground drinking water supplies.
“The board has generally demonstrated a lack of urgency in providing this critical assistance,” the auditor wrote. “The longer the board takes to fund projects, the more expensive the projects become. More importantly, delays increase the likelihood of negative health outcomes for Californians served by the failing water systems.”
The audit identified 370 communities with failing systems, serving a total of 920,000 people, as of last December.
“Hundreds of additional water systems are currently at risk of failing,” the report added. California has more than 7,400 municipal and community water systems.
The problem is rampant in the Valley in no small part because of agriculture. Nitrate, the result of farm fertilizer seeping into the water supply, can cause numerous health issues for infants. Excessive levels of arsenic can cause problems with skin and circulatory systems, and elevate the risk of cancer.
Tilden’s audit acknowledged that a change in the law has contributed to the problem, requiring the water board to shift its focus to helping smaller water systems. That means the board is spending more of its time handling grant requests from managers of “smaller, potentially less sophisticated” systems who need technical assistance from the board’s staff, the audit said.
However, the audit said the water board’s “cumbersome application process” bears much of the blame for the delays in getting money out the door. And in one case, involving a request filed by the city of Manteca to fix the drinking water in its schools, the board’s staff botched the application and caused a lengthy delay.
“The application was held up for more than a year because the (board’s) technical assistance provider submitted some documents that were incomplete and never submitted other documents at all,” the audit said.
The water board, in a written response to the audit, said “there are improvements that can be made” in streamlining the process for approving grants and loans.
But the board’s executive director, Eileen Sobeck, said her agency has “made great strides” in handling grant and loan requests.
For instance, in 2019 the Legislature set up a new drinking-water program, called SAFER. In the first three years, the program helped reduce the number of Californians drinking unsafe water from 1.6 million to 934,000, Sobeck said.
