This page was created by Gwen Connor.
General State Government Inaction
After people have been advocating for better water quality control for years, the government created new policies such as the Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, Human Right to Water, Safe Drinking Water Act, and the SAFER Act. These policies passed but their solutions have not reached many San Joaquin Valley communities. California boasted that they were the first state to recognize that “every human being had the right to safe, clean, affordable, and accessible water”. This doesn't seem to be the case though. The Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA) made it the government's responsibility to regulate the nation’s drinking water and ensure public safety. The SDWA also says that California has primacy, and therefore has the agency to regulate their own water systems. Allegedly the SDWA provides grants for those trying to improve their water quality, ensures that waste does not enter the water system through the ground, shares public information about water quality and its effects accessibly, and ensures that water is always held to certain standards of safety. If this was true then the problem would be solved.
The Environmental Protection Agency, or the EPA, is the organization in charge of water protection. In 2012, they found that over 50% of the systems in California that failed to meet water quality standards were in the San Joaquin Valley. Their solution was to bring 21 systems into the valley every year for the next three years. This would still leave 77 systems with water contamination. They also stated that they provided “funding for education and training to more than 200 valley residents about preventing pollution of drinking water”. In a community with over four million people, educating about 200 individuals is not enough. This was also the only resource I could find about water protection on the EPA website for this region. This amount of action and information is not sufficient enough to solve the problem. A recent news article talks about how in one San Joaquin Valley county a new groundbank is being proposed in an area where contamination has not been found. The project is currently on standby. Yet another example of the government not effectively fixing the problem, just half-heartedly trying.