Candidate addresses water crisis
The local water-contamination crisis has been a double tragedy for the affected families in Hoosick Falls and Petersburgh. First, there are those who were exposed to perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) polluted water for years if not decades. Then the Cuomo administration’s slow-footed response failed to reassure residents that their drinking water was being made safe. While a welcome aspect of redress, extending the statute of limitations to file claims at Superfund sites won’t prevent a future water crisis. What’s needed is more transparency and regulatory certainty: for residents, consumers and businesses. The failure to take seriously and remediate the discovery of potentially carcinogenic water in 2014 was a failure of state government.
When I met with Hoosick Falls residents and local elected officials earlier this year I immediately sensed their frustration and anger. Here was a place where families felt they had been forgotten about by those in power, specifically Albany.
When help finally arrived from the state capital it was after much public back and forth. The state legislature, under pressure by the Cuomo administration to soft pedal the growing water crisis, was seemingly reluctant to hold oversight hearings. Such hearings could help inform the public as to the state agencies which dropped the regulatory ball. Thankfully, last month Assembly and Senate leaders took the appropriate step and scheduled hearings beginning on August 30 in Hoosick Falls.
So how do we keep drinking water clean and give citizens confidence that episodes like this can be avoided in the future? Certainly the Superfund’s monitoring and remediation should continue. And those responsible should incur the costs of cleanup. But we also need timely updates to our national testing standards for toxic substances and a mechanism for the federal government to eventually limit or eliminate their use.
The good news is that Congress, earlier this year and on a bipartisan basis, took important steps to address the need to update the registry of potentially toxic chemicals routinely used by industry. I supported the passage of an update to the Toxic Substances Act this spring as a solid first step to consumer and regulatory clarity.
The Toxic Substances Act is a 40-year-old law that allows the EPA to keep track of commercial chemicals, including maintaining an inventory and monitoring the use and disposal of substances such as asbestos. Without this long-overdue update, 64,000 chemicals Americans are exposed to would not be subject to environmental testing or regulation. This bipartisan approach will provide better information to the public and start the regular environmental testing of chemicals which may potentially harm water supplies and human beings. It keeps pace with scientific advances without sacrificing public health.
The betrayal felt by those in Hoosick Falls and Petersburgh won’t be overcome through a legislative hearing or enactment of a new federal law. Updates under the Toxic Substances Act are critical and so is legislative oversight of agency decisionmaking. Pending state and federal investigations are necessary to understand what went wrong. The searing testimony provided by families on the front lines of this crisis must remind those in power that greater transparency is inseparable from effective policy. This is about our communities providing a wakeup call to the turgid bureaucracy that failed them. I’ll be standing with them, and listening, when they do. — John Faso is running for Congress in the 19th Congressional District