December 16, 2025, marks the 51st anniversary of the Safe Drinking Water Act (SDWA). Looking back is only useful if it helps inform how we move forward. While the SDWA has made tremendous progress in improving public health protection, the law and its implementation would benefit from careful retrospective analysis to inform potential amendments and revisions.
The Madison Declaration identified five major SDWA challenges and five focus areas for the next 50 years. Here I focus on the need for “Rigorous and Effective Enforcement”. I intentionally added “Effective,” because enforcement only matters if it produces the intended result, improved public health protection through sustained compliance with drinking regulations.
Today, national non-compliance rates for the more than 150,000 public water systems in the United States has hovered around 26-27% for many years. This high of a percentage is unacceptable and there is no easy solution.
As my colleague Manny Teodoro has observed, regulations without enforcement are merely suggestions. Regulators take violations seriously. The challenge is that many systems don’t have the technical, managerial, or financial capabilities to return to compliance. And those three traditional components of system capacity don’t address any social or cultural considerations within the community. Sometimes the social or cultural issues are the most significant and are the least obvious when making a system inspection.
No state or federal regulator wants violations. Nobody in the drinking community, including the systems and the customers, think violations don’t warrant some action. However, the sheer number of systems with violations demands prioritization. The Enforcement Targeting Tool (ETT) is used by EPA and states to prioritize enforcement actions for public water systems. The ETT assigns scores based on unaddressed violations, with higher points given to more severe issues such as acute Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) violations and long-standing non-compliance. A score of 11 or higher designates a system as a “nationally significant” enforcement priority. ETT is at least a starting point to prioritize efforts to work with systems to fix the violation and return to compliance.
From my point of view, systems with violations and/or potential violations can be broken down into three categories:
– Basket-case
– Occasional
– At-risk
Enforcement becomes challenging with what I refer to as “basket-case” systems. In my limited research, I have seen small community water systems serving 100-500 people with EET scores over 100. These systems often face deep, systemic challenges, including poor source water quality, aging or failing treatment plants, chronic sampling violations, and ineffective governance, often managed by volunteers. These problems are compounded by remote locations and customer bases that cannot support the rates needed to cover capital investments and operation and maintenance costs. With a “basket-case” system, enforcement orders are just another piece of paper that goes into the shoebox filing system. Effective enforcement can, in some/many cases, require more than an enforcement order or a compliance order.
System with systemic issues generally require significant “hand-holding” to get to the desired outcome, i.e., returning to compliance and staying in compliance. In my limited experience providing pro bono engineering advice to a system with 85 connections, it took a combination of assistance from the primacy agency and from local affiliates of both the Rural Assistance Corporation (RCAP) and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA). It also required community leaders willing to put in the time, the county stepping in to take over system operations and billing, and a consulting engineer who knew how to “value-engineer” solutions that minimized construction costs while still achieving compliance. While this significant effort worked for this one specific system, such an effort is typically not available for every violation.
Another category of violators are the “occasional” systems. These systems may experience an equipment failure or operator error that results in a violation. Typically, they recognize the issue, take corrective action, and return to compliance. Some fixes take time, such as designing and constructing infrastructure improvements, but these systems typically don’t require much “hand-holding” to return to compliance.
Finally, we have “at-risk” system, i.e., those systems that stay just below the compliance line but are one breakdown away from a MCL violation. In an ideal world, regulators would have the data and the data analysis tools to anticipate and prevent violations. In reality, resource constraints, both people and funding, preclude this anticipatory analysis from occurring. Overloaded state regulators are swamped with the “basket-cases” and the “occasional” violators.
Compounding these challenges is the complexity of the drinking water regulatory framework itself. More than 90 contaminants are regulated, with compliance monitoring occurring at treatment plants, throughout distribution systems, and under the Lead and Copper Rule (LCR), inside customers’ homes. Beyond compliance, violations are often just the tip of the iceberg, masking deeper resilience risks that only become visible when failures occur.
Single points of failure can be present at many different points in a water system and don’t become a problem until failure occurs. Aging infrastructure is becoming a more significant issue across the county. A break in an older 48-inch transmission main can leave a large portion of community without water service. And that outage could last for a while, depending on the availability of a 48-inch repair sleeve and/or other fittings. A wildfire in the suburban/forest interface can destroy a significant amount of infrastructure that could take months to replace. An electrical mishap in a motor control center could take months to replace due to overseas supply chain. A cybersecurity hack could create a system-wide shutdown with an uncertainty time for restoration to normal water service.
That being said, further research and discussion is needed to determine how to respond to serious or ongoing SDWA violations with swift and effective enforcement. Somehow, additional resources need to be found to provide the appropriate “hand-holding” for the many communities with systemic issues. Collectively, the drinking water community must level the regulatory field so that SDWA protections and enforcement apply to all public, private, and nonprofit water systems.
For a broader discussion of these themes and what they mean for the future of drinking water regulation, see Safe Drinking Water Act: The Next Fifty Years (pre-order on Amazon).