The director of Maine’s Drinking Water Program said regulations being proposed by a sister state agency governing how much water districts can pump from lakes and streams could have the unintended consequence of making the public’s water supply less pure and more expensive to treat.
“Our fear is it would force some water utilities to go from a very pristine water source to a lower quality source,” said Nancy Beardsley, head of the water program in the Department of Health and Human Services.
That could mean digging a well, which is “costly and could have other naturally occurring contaminants,” including arsenic and uranium, she said, or going to a less desirable above ground source.
Beardsley testified as part of a day-long public hearing last week on the Department of Environmental Protection’s proposed rules on how much water farmers, water districts and other users can take out of a lake, stream or river.
The Board of Environmental Protection, which held the hearing, will accept comment up until Aug 18 before it makes a recommendation that will have to be approved by the Legislature next year.
Andy Fisk, head of the bureau of Land and Water Quality in the DEP, defended the rule.
“We’re not in a crisis mode here. Maine is a water-rich state,” Fisk said, but the resource needs to be protected for the future.
The proposed water rules – governing above-ground sources – would determine acceptable water levels and flows in lakes, rivers and streams based on what it takes to support aquatic life. The rules would be phased in giving farmers at least five years to come into compliance and water districts a kind of rolling deadline as long as those drawing more than allowed file and operate under withdrawal certificates.
Everyone would technically be bound by the rules, but water districts and the public they serve account for more than 90 percent of the above ground water consumption in the state.
Beardsley said by her estimation “at least seven and perhaps three times that many” of the state’s 52 public water systems using surface supplies would need a withdrawal certificate necessitating several years of costly hydrologic and biological studies.
Those seven are water districts serving Camden and Rockland, Augusta, Boothbay, Kennebunk, Kittery, Vinalhaven and York.
Richard Knowlton, vice president of operations for Aqua Marine, which operates 16 community water systems in the state, including five using surface water, said most certainly the number is greater than seven. He expects Bar Harbor, the Mount Desert Water District, Brewer and Dover-Foxcroft, to name a few, will be in the mix.
Knowlton’s company operates the district in Camden and Rockland, and said drilling for well water is not an option for most large districts along the coast because of the granite shore.
“From the east side of Bath all the way to Canada,” he said, large wells are not an option. “The geology doesn’t allow it along the coast.”
And, that means running headlong into the political reality that the best above ground sources not already being used as public water supplies will compete “with recreating, fishing and waterfront values,” Knowlton said.
Some of the state’s largest districts, like Portland Water District, drawing out of Sebago Lake, and the Biddeford and Saco Water Company, drawing out of the Saco River, would not be immediately affected by the rule because their water sources are so vast. Representatives from those districts did attend the hearing, however, out of concern about what the regulations could mean in the future.
Water district operators first want an exemption from the rule – something they say they were promised but now told they can’t have under federal law – and second more time and a higher pecking order on the use list, above aquatic life.
Representatives from Trout Unlimited – a national organization – spoke in favor of the rule and against any exemptions or delays.
“Even in a rural state like Maine with average rainfall over 40 inches, protection of the stream flow is critically important for trout and salmon,” said Jeff Reardon, a New England director for the group. Reardon said, “it’s inappropriate and unfair to establish a different standard for water utilities than the one that applies to all other users,” adding considerable leeway already had been included in the proposal.
Farmers have been targeted as well by the rule because they use streams for irrigation at the very time streams are most vulnerable – when the weather is dry or in drought conditions.
State Agriculture Commissioner Seth Bradstreet, a potato farmer, criticized the proposed rules, saying they were too complicated and expensive. He called the DEP’s dual goals of protecting aquatic habitat and the farmers’ right to water a “mission impossible.”
He said farmers on their own will not be able to determine the acceptable flow level in a river or stream.
“When this information was presented to me, I could not even understand how to do it. DEP believes they can go out and do it quickly, but the rules do not state DEP will do this, nor does it tell the farmers how to do it,” Bradstreet said. And, paying for the studies could cost between $25,000 to $100,000 per location. “No farmer has the time or money to conduct these studies.”
What the DEP wants is for farmers to build storage ponds for times of drought, and the Legislature this past session set up an Agricultural Water Management Board to help them apply for public funds and work through the permits needed to create man-made ponds.
“We will continue to move in that direction, but quite frankly, it will take more than five years to get all farmers out of protected streams,” Bradstreet said. “Our survey in 2002 projected that over 400 farmers need assistance totaling over $15 million.”
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