Protecting groundwater: debate moves to regulatory process

It didn't take much last October to mobilize the Pleasant Valley Water District board of directors into action. With the results of a state-sponsored well survey in hand, the board decided something must be done immediately to protect the water supply to its 3,500 customers in this small community near Peoria.

Enter the relatively new Illinois Groundwater Protection Act (IGPA) passed in September 1987. In part, the act gives local officials the power to regulate how land is used within 1,000 feet of their wells in sensitive areas. The Pleasant Valley board went to work. But what the act didn't provide the board was a hint about the political obstacles that would be thrown in its path before it got approval from the Peoria County Board two months later to implement the 1,000-foot setback provision for the district's three wells.

"The county board's reluctance ended up really being fear," recalls Sandy Moldovan, vice president of Clark Engineering, a water consulting firm with which the Pleasant Valley board was working. "Everyone was in favor of protecting the water. The question was: 'Will this hurt business?' And once we limit the uses, is the land worth less?"

Those are just some of the tough questions that state agencies, local governments, environmentalists and industry must struggle with before the innovative and award-winning IGPA begins to work statewide. It will take years to fully implement the act. The act's intent is to prevent further pollution — or degradation — of the state's aquifers that supply drinking water to 5.5 million people. Those intricate underground water systems replenish more than 3,000 community wells; 7,300 noncommunity wells servicing schools and restaurants; and about 400,000 private wells hooked up to residences.

Preventive approaches to groundwater protection, such as a 1,000-foot maximum setback zone that Pleasant Valley hopes to put in place, have become paramount in light of the extremely difficult, if not impossible, task of cleaning up ground water supplies once contaminated. Groundwater movement is slow, meaning that chemicals once in the water supply can remain hazardous for an indefinite period. Since it is not easy to reach underground supplies, cleanup also is expensive.

The 48-page IGPA was hammered out over a two-year period, marked by hot negotiations and reluctant trade-offs between industry and environmentalists followed by exhaustive rewrites. The law itself has several so-called self-triggering mechanisms, such as the wellhead setback zones, designed to give local officials the opportunity to begin immediately to protect their wells. While the act has been in place more than a year, Pleasant Valley is the first community to try to implement the optional 1,000-foot setback provision, partly because of what Moldovan calls its progressive attitude towards water protection. The minimum setback zone is 200 feet and has been in effect since January 1, 1988, for new wells as well as for any new business locating near any well. The setback zone provides protection between a well and potential sources of contamination such as landfills, underground or ground-level chemical storage tanks and wastewater treatment facilities.

Setback zones allow local planning and zoning boards to regulate uses that may be potential contamination sources to the wells. Under the provisions, any new potential contamination source, such as a landfill, will no longer be permitted within the setback zone. While the minimum setback of 200 feet automatically takes effect, communities may apply for the maximum setback if they show that their wells are particularly vulnerable to pollution.

But a community's decision to pursue the maximum setback and getting one enacted are two entirely different things, as Pleasant Valley discovered. The loss to communities, Moldovan points out, may be restriction of business and industrial development. New businesses that are allowed to locate within a setback zone will be more closely scrutizined during their planning stages as to their waste disposal methods and other activities that may contaminate the groundwater.

To get the maximum setback, communities must show through a series of technical tests stipulated by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency (IEPA) that their wells, due to geological conditions, are particularly susceptible to contamination. Those tests could be costly, Moldovan points out. Whatever the obstacles, he encourages local governments to determine whether the maximum setback should apply in their communities and if they need it, to adopt an ordinance establishing one. Although the process now is a voluntary one, the state, beginning July 1, will have the authority to set the maximum 1,000-foot zone in areas that meet the technical requirements if a local government has not acted. Such action, however, could pit the state against local interests. As Moldovan points out, "It's very clear to me that unless local government units shoulder responsiblity of the act, the act will be ineffective," Moldovan says. "We need to have a great deal of public awareness of the act's provisions and what to do with them."

While setback zones may prove controversial locally, perhaps the next biggest statewide fight in implementing the IGPA will be the setting of standards to assure clean groundwater. These standards, which dictate the upper limits of chemical concentration in the water,

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serve as a yardstick for achieving and maintaining ground-water purity. The IEPA must present a set of proposed standards to the Illinois Pollution Control Board by July 1. The board will then have two years to approve those standards, and debate is likely during that process.

The IEPA, along with two IGPA-mandated task forces, currently is soliciting suggestions from groups on just what those standards should be. A seminar on the IGPA was held December 1 in Lisle, and the IEPA expects to hold a meeting to discuss standards this month. Even with public input, state officials, environmentalists and industry are bracing themselves for a fierce fight in the upcoming months.

"We have a difficult road ahead," says Joanna Hoelscher, director of the statewide Citizens for a Better Environment, with some degree of understatement. "These are issues that were not negotiated in the bill. . . . The battle will focus on how much pollution will be allowed." Adds Roger Kanerva, IEPA's manager of environmental programs: "I suspect [standards] to be a significant struggle."

Already lining up on one side are industry groups which will try to get standards relaxed enough to continue their operations without costly modifications. At the December 1 conference, Max McCombe, with Monsanto Chemical Corp., cautioned that the state needs to "look at chemicals . . . with identifiable health effects associated with them. Illinois needs to look at a list that is developed already." Additionally, McCombe said industry would push for standards for which methods to measure contaminant levels are both econmically and technically feasible.

On the other side are environmentalists, many of whom believe that any change in groundwater quality should alert state officials that action must be taken to stop the source of contamination. They point out that standards have not prevented contamination in the past and that numerical standards have meant pollution will occur up to the levels that are set. Further, they would prefer that standards be based on health hazards whether the technology or money exists to test for these levels. Although opponents are quick to point out the impracticality of this approach, environmentalists maintain that technology will eventually catch up with the standards, which they say, must be a safeguard against pollution for decades to come.

"Some people have the mindset that, literally, we ought to talk about any change in the groundwater," Kanerva says. "But to say there should be no impact when we are a society that uses chemicals is an unachievable situation. We need to set a no-change goal and have the mechanisms [in place] so that when change happens we can try and minimize [any contamination].'' That may be easier said than done, however.

The state has several avenues along which it can maneuver on its way to acceptable standards. The first would be to adopt the federal Safe Drinking Water Act standards for groundwater. According to a 1986 Illinois Department of Energy and Natural Resources survey, a majority of the 39 states responding said they use these standards. Some states regulate more chemicals than those regulated by the federal standards, or they apply stricter standards than the federal levels. New York, for example, regulates 51 organic substances not found on the federal list.

Another option would be to follow the lead of neighboring Iowa, whose groundwater protection act was approved the same year as Illinois' and also was cited by the National Center for Policy Alternatives for being one of the 10 best bills enacted in 1987. A major difference between the Iowa and Illinois legislation, however, is Iowa's so-called nondegradation objective to "prevent contamination to the greatest extent possible." To that end, the Iowa Department of Natural Resources recommended to its legislature last month that no numerical standards be put in place for at least 10 years. Instead of numbers, Iowa hopes to adopt a narrative standard: Any degradation of groundwater quality would be acted upon, no matter what the level of contamination may be. "Numbers should not drive our program," Richard Kelley, an environmental specialist with the Iowa Department of Natural Resources, told Illinois conference participants December 1. "Historically, standards have been clean-up standards. They were put in place when pollution became intolerable."

The other major difference between the Iowa and Illinois programs is funding. Iowa has $11 million with which to pursue research and education programs. Illinois, by contrast, has about $1.8 million from the Hazardous Waste Fund, Special Waste Hauler Fee Fund and General Revenue Fund, with no new funding sources in the forseeable future, Kanerva says.

While both Kanerva and Hoelscher doubt that Illinois will follow Iowa's approach in foregoing standards altogether, both suspect some trigger mechanism may be established by administrative rule to alert officials of contamination before any maximum allowable levels for contaminants are reached. Modeled after approaches in Wisconsin and Washington state, the trigger mechanism or so-called "preventative action limits," would alert officials that contamination has taken place when the level of a pollutant reaches, say, as in the Wisconsin law, 10 percent of what the standards allow. "If only a minimum level of contaminant shows up, we want that to mandate an investigation and remedial action," Hoelscher says. "Once it's in the water, it's still in the soil. Contamination will only get worse before it gets better.'' But counters industry's McCombe, who fears trigger mechanisms will be arbitrarily set: "The issue, when you get down to it, is not what triggers [action], but what you do when that trigger is reached."

Standards, once in place, should set the tone for how vigorously the state plans to protect its groundwater, but they will not end the debate on implementation of the IGPA. So many questions still must be answered: Where will the standards be applied, for example, at the initial point of contamination or 10 miles away? Who will bear the cost for contaminant testing, which can run upwards of $1,000 for each test? What controls will be placed on the agricultural community's use of chemicals? And how will recharge areas (vast areas from which aquifers replenish their water supplies) be protected when they often cross municipal, county and state boundaries?

The bottom line may become a dollar-and-cents issue. As one municipal official succinctly put it: "We must not get to the point where our water is so pure nobody can afford to drink it." But can anybody afford to drink water that makes everybody sick?

Shelley Helton is a Springfield-based free-lance writer.

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