Tag Archive for: Drinking Water

OPINION: State Lawmakers May Ask Us To ‘Donate’ A Monthly Fee To Fund Clean Drinking Water. Bad Idea

/in , /by /The Tribune (San Luis Obispo)

Everyone in California — and everywhere else, for that matter — deserves clean drinking water. But relying on charity to upgrade failing water systems in low-income California communities is not the way to meet a basic human need. Yet that’s essentially what state Sen. Bill Monning is proposing in SB 845. The bill would require water purveyors throughout the state to offer their customers the “opportunity” to pay a monthly fee of 95 cents per household.

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OPINION: California’s Can’t-Miss Chance To Provide Safe Drinking Water For All

/in , /by /Water Deeply (New York)by Kirsten James

The clock is ticking to ensure clean drinking water is available to all in California. Legislators have just five days to help an estimated 1 million Californians access safe and affordable drinking water from their faucets. In the world’s fifth-largest economy, there should be no question about voting “yes” for the Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund (SB 844 and SB 845). Stories we’ve heard from around the state make the need all the more compelling.

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OPINION: Safe Drinking Water For All

/in , /by /The New York Timesby Laurel Firestone and Susana De Anda

In 2007, the small town of Lanare in California’s Central Valley finally got what it had desperately needed for years — a treatment plant to remove high levels of arsenic in the drinking water. But the victory was short-lived. Just months after the $1.3 million federally funded plant began running, the town was forced to shut it down because it ran out of money to operate and maintain it. More than a decade later, the plant remains closed and Lanare’s tap water is still contaminated — as is the drinking water piped to about a million other Californians around the state.

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California Says This Chemical Causes Cancer. So Why Is It Being Sprayed Into Drinking Water?

/in , /by /The Sacramento Beeby Ryan Sabalow

A year ago, the active ingredient in Roundup, the nation’s most widely used weed-killing herbicide, was added to California’s official list of chemicals known to cause cancer. The state’s warning about glyphosate followed a similar caution issued by the World Health Organization and coincided with hundreds of lawsuits across the country focused on the herbicide. The first very jury trial to involve Roundup recently started in San Francisco —the plaintiff is a groundskeeper who believes he developed non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma by using the weedkiller on the job.

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Does Your School Have Lead In Its Drinking Water?

/in , /by /The San Diego Union-Tribuneby Lauryn Schroeder and Morgan Cook

Eleven schools in San Diego County had unsafe levels of lead in drinking water last year, according to new data from the California State Water Resources Control Board, and more test results are expected soon as schools adhere to new legislation. Gov. Jerry Brown in October signed a law that requires community water systems to test drinking water for lead in all public schools that serve kindergarten through 12th grade by July 2019. It took effect in January 2017. So far, more than 500 schools in the county have been tested.

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Nestlé Granted Three-Year Permit To Keep Piping Water Out Of California National Forest

/in , /by /The Desert Sun (Palm Springs)by Ian James

The U.S. Forest Service has granted Nestle a new three-year permit to continue operating its bottled water pipeline in the San Bernardino National Forest. The agency announced the decision Wednesday, saying the permit has been offered to the company “with measures to improve the watershed’s health” along Strawberry Creek. The Forest Service took up the matter in 2015 after a Desert Sun investigation revealed Nestlé was piping water out of the mountains under a permit that listed 1988 as the expiration date.

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OPINION: California, The World’s Fifth-Largest Economy, Has A Third World Drinking Water Problem

/in , /by /Los Angeles Times

Even in times of drought, California’s natural and human-made arteries run with the nation’s cleanest, most accessible water. So fundamental is the stuff to the state’s identity and to its residents’ daily lives that California law recognizes a human right to “safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water adequate for human consumption, cooking, and sanitary purposes.”

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OPINION: This Is California. We Should Be Able To Drink The Water. Lawmakers, Fix This Disgrace

/in , /by /The Fresno Bee

In the world’s fifth-largest economy, in the richest state in the richest nation, some 360,000 Californians have water that is unsafe to drink. That’s the equivalent of about three and a half Flint, Michigans, and it’s an outrage. Worse, it’s a fixable outrage, and the fix is being blocked by vested interests. This stalemate has gone on for more than a year now at the state Capitol while vulnerable families, many of them in the Central Valley, have lived as if this is a Third World country. Enough is enough. Let’s deal with this.

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OPINION: Taxing Your Drinking Water Is No Solution

/in , /by /The Daily Journal (San Mateo)by Dave Warden

As a local water agency, the Mid-Peninsula Water District (MPWD) is committed to delivering safe and reliable water to our customers. We are among the vast majority of Californians with access to safe drinking water. Unfortunately, some in the state, who live in small, rural, disadvantaged communities, do not have access to safe drinking water. While we support the goal of ensuring safe drinking water for all Californians, the latest proposal to impose new state taxes on our drinking water is the wrong solution to a problem that we agree must be solved.

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360,000 Californians Have Unsafe Drinking Water. Are You One Of Them?

/in , /by /The Sacramento Beeby Dale Kasler, Phillip Reese, and Ryan Sabalow

At the Shiloh elementary school near Modesto, drinking fountains sit abandoned, covered in clear plastic. At Mom and Pop’s Diner, a fixture in the Merced County town of Dos Palos, regulars ask for bottled water because they know better than to consume what comes out of the tap. And in rural Alpaugh, a few miles west of Highway 99 in Tulare County, residents such as Sandra Meraz have spent more than four decades worrying about what flows from their faucets. “You drink the water at your own risk,” said Meraz, 77. “And that shouldn’t be. We have families here with young children.”

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