Enforcement: Helping a Small Town Make Progress
Our primary purpose under our Safe Drinking Water Program is to protect public health by implementing and assuring compliance with both the federal and state drinking water regulations. Our drinking water regulations establish requirements and standards that every public drinking water system must meet in order to protect public health. When we determine that a public drinking water system is out of compliance, we take steps to ensure the system provides the required public notice and we identify and pursue the next actions that are needed to address the issue (e.g., increased monitoring, treatment upgrades, coaching/assistance efforts, and/or enforcement actions), all with the goal of getting the system back into compliance so that any impact to the public’s drinking water is minimized.
For any violation that may occur at any drinking water system in Colorado, we assess a number of criteria to determine the appropriate action to take in response, including the nature of the violation, the short and long-term impact to public health, how quickly the facility comes back into compliance, and the cause of the violation. As indicated above, our primary goal when a system goes out of compliance is getting the system back into compliance. We first use assistance to achieve this goal. We will, however, use enforcement tools when needed to compel the system to correct the issue. We prioritize our efforts on those drinking water systems that are having the greatest difficulties meeting the regulatory requirements in order to prevent any potential health impacts to consumers.
In a recent example, the Department used a combination of enforcement and assistance to help the Town of Hartman define a path to compliance. The public water system has a history of technical, managerial, and financial (TMF) capacity challenges, including neglected maintenance, equipment problems, lack of a certified operator, and lack of monitoring and reporting. The Department issued the Town an enforcement order with a $7,498.00 penalty in March 2020. While the penalty may seem high for a small town, forty percent of the penalty amount was assessed to remove the economic benefit created by the Town not paying lab costs for the missed sampling. The remainder of the penalty was assessed as the standard base penalty for the 64 violations that the Town accrued in 2018 - 2020. After the issuance of the Order, the Colorado Department of Local Affairs (DOLA) was alerted to several financial practices inconsistent with local government statutes. DOLA also joined the assistance efforts by helping the Town hold a special election for board members and to correct the local government filings. DOLA is now attending Town board meetings until the new leadership is up-to-speed on local government roles and responsibilities. In June 2020, the Town contracted with a certified operator from a neighboring town. In July 2020, we awarded a $25,000 grant to hire a contract engineer to inspect and repair the storage tank, write and implement a backflow prevention and cross-connection control program, collect all overdue compliance samples, prepare public notices, and to respond to the Order. On October 6, 2020, after working with the new Town board and inspecting the storage tank, the contract engineer created an action plan to return the Town to compliance by the end of the 2020 calendar year. The combination of enforcement and assistance seems to have been effective in getting the Town on a path to improving. CDPHE will continue to monitor the Town’s corrective actions to ensure that the drinking water meets regulatory requirements and that the Town implements a strategy to maintain compliance going forward.
Partner with Us to Protect Safe Drinking Water!
Access to safe drinking water is a basic human necessity that we want all residents and visitors in Colorado to experience. Everyday, we aim to make that a reality by partnering with water professionals and regulated entities on our shared mission to protect public health.
➽ Emily Clark, Enforcement & Field Findings Compliance Lead
