On April 10, the Maryland General Assembly passed the Private Well Safety Act (HB 11/SB 483) before it wrapped up the 2023 legislative session at midnight (Happy Sine Die!).
With its passage, the Private Well Safety Act will provide roughly 830,000 Marylanders who get their drinking water from a private well with the necessary resources and information to monitor and safeguard their household drinking water and ultimately protect their and their family’s health.
While some progress has been made, Maryland has lagged far behind most states in private well water protections. In a 2020 report released by the Center, researchers found that Maryland ranked among the five states with the fewest protections.
Aside from basic construction and safety requirements and an initial water quality test when a new well is drilled, families that rely on private well water in Maryland are entirely responsible for the safety of their drinking water. Many can’t afford to or don’t know that they need to regularly test their water for harmful contaminants. These contaminants can be dangerous to health, and some are colorless, tasteless, and odorless.
In 2020, a study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that on Maryland’s Lower Eastern Shore, “cancer patients were more likely to live in homes supplied by private well water compared to individuals in the general regional population.”
Generally speaking, the Lower Eastern Shore of Maryland is rural and zoned heavily for agricultural use, so it’s home to hundreds of facilities that house and feed chickens and hens in crowded conditions.Our 2020 report posits a source for the increased cancer risk associated with private well water: nitrate, which is an undetectable contaminant often found in groundwater from the excess application of manure and fertilizer to fields.
In two Lower Eastern Shore counties, one in 25 wells had nitrate levels above the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) safe drinking water threshold, our report found. Nitrate levels above this threshold are known to cause blue baby syndrome, a condition fatal to infants through oxygen deprivation. Research also links nitrate in drinking water at levels well below EPA’s threshold with an increased risk of cancer, particularly colon cancer, as well as pregnancy complications and thyroid disease. Data from the U.S. Geological Survey and the Chesapeake Bay Program show that nitrate levels have steadily increased in Lower Eastern Shore waterways.
Whether it is nitrates or another drinking water contaminant, the Private Well Safety Act is a critical first step to ensuring that all Marylanders have a right to safe, clean drinking water. As amended and passed, the Private Well Safety Act will:
In future years, the Maryland General Assembly should work with MDE to establish a private well grant fund. This fund would help educate Marylanders on the importance of annual testing and provide funds for lower-wealth families to test and remediate their well water if unsafe levels of contaminants are found.
These common-sense protections will make a positive difference for private well owners and users in Maryland for years to come.
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Katlyn Schmitt | April 11, 2023
On April 10, the Maryland General Assembly passed the Private Well Safety Act (HB 11/SB 483) before it wrapped up the 2023 legislative session at midnight (Happy Sine Die!). With its passage, the Private Well Safety Act will provide roughly 830,000 Marylanders who get their drinking water from a private well with the necessary resources and information to monitor and safeguard their household drinking water and ultimately protect their and their family’s health.
Federico Holm, Katlyn Schmitt | April 10, 2023
The Maryland Senate has just one day left to pass a bill that would deliver greater energy savings for Marylanders through the EmPOWER program — the state’s energy efficiency and weatherization program. The bill would build on the success of the EmPOWER program by ensuring lower energy bills for low-wealth Marylanders, as well as greater public health and climate benefits that coincide with improved energy efficiency.
Kimberly Shields | April 3, 2023
In a recent post, my colleague M. Isabelle Chaudry provided readers with an overview of some of the toxic chemical threats facing the Delaware River basin in the northeastern United States. In this post, I dig deeper into the modern history of flooding in a region that will be home to 9 million people by 2030 and how this poses a growing risk of toxic floodwaters for families and communities in Pennsylvania, Delaware, New Jersey, and New York.
Sidney A. Shapiro | March 30, 2023
The American public has lost faith in expertise. The reason why, as author and national security expert Tom Nichols points out in his 2017 book The Death of Expertise, includes the transformation of the news industry into a 24-hour entertainment machine, the number of “low-information voters,” political leaders who traffic in “alternative facts,” and, as Nichols puts it, a “Google-fueled, Wikipedia-based, blog-sodden collapse of any division between professionals and lay people, students and teachers, knowers and wonderers — in other words between those of any achievement in an area and those with none at all.” Bill Araiza offers another important insight in his book, Rebuilding Expertise: Increasing legal and political efforts to oversee agencies have resulted in the deterioration of civil service expertise and, with it, of public faith in government. On the front end, these efforts send a message that expertise can’t be trusted. On the back end, when the government stumbles in carrying out its functions, the message is that experts are not so expert after all. What is missed, as Liz Fisher and I contend in our book, Administrative Competence, is that law and politics can hold agencies accountable and still facilitate their capacity to do their job. Araiza’s last chapter ably discusses how this can be done.
James Goodwin | March 16, 2023
The regulatory policy world is often a sleepy one — I’m the first to admit that — but last week was a notable exception. In addition to a U.S. House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on regulations, the Biden administration’s Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (OIRA) wrapped up efforts to solicit public input on its recommendations for broadening public input in the regulatory process.
Daniel Farber | March 16, 2023
EPA proposed new regulations last week to reduce the water pollution impacts of coal-fired power plants. As EPA regulations go, these count as fairly minor. They got a bit of news coverage in coal country and industry publications. But they will eliminate the discharge of thousands of tons of pollutants, including a lot of metals that pose health problems. The rulemaking illustrates the highly technical nature of regulations and the lawless nature of Trump’s EPA. It also gives some clues about where the Biden administration may be headed in the way it approaches regulatory decisions.
James Goodwin, Marcha Chaudry | March 15, 2023
The Delaware River Basin is a vital ecosystem that provides drinking water for millions of people and supports diverse wildlife, recreation, and agriculture in Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. Unfortunately, industrial activities in the basin contaminate the water with toxic pollutants, leading to a variety of negative impacts on human health and the environment and endangering industrial workers.
Marcha Chaudry | March 14, 2023
On average, women who work full-time earn 84 cents for every dollar that men earn. Addressing these barriers requires a multifaceted approach.
James Goodwin | March 13, 2023
The regulatory system is a vital part of our constitutional democracy; with smart reforms, it can empower the public and continue enforcing policies that make us all safer, healthier, and freer. That was the message that Member Scholars of the Center for Progressive Reform successfully conveyed during last Friday’s subcommittee hearing of the U.S. House Judiciary Committee.