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 How will providers find millions to fix the water?

Smaller, rural water providers will pay highest costs to come into compliance with EPA’s new PFAS rules

By NOELLE PHILLIPS | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | The Denver Post and ELISE SCHMELZER | This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | The Denver Post

PUBLISHED: April 21, 2024 at 6:00 a.m. | UPDATED: April 21, 2024 at 9:51 a.m.

Utilities that provide drinking water to nearly 268,000 Coloradans will need tens of millions of dollars over the next five years to comply with new federal limits on harmful “forever chemicals,” but finding the money will be a challenge — especially for small, rural systems.

The 27 water systems identified by the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment as exceeding the new standards range in size from Thornton, which serves about 155,000 customers, to Dawn of Hope Ranch, a religious retreat in Teller County that serves 55 people.

Some of the larger utilities on the state’s list already are planning to build multimillion-dollar filtration systems, but experts say the smaller water providers will be among the last to fall into compliance. While grant money is available, experts note it’s likely water customers will pay some of the costs via higher rates.

The federal regulations announced 10 days ago require drinking water providers to lower the concentration of forever chemicals below the new limit by 2029. The chemicals — perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, collectively known as PFAS — have been used for decades to make waterproof, nonstick or stain-resistant products and are linked to a wide range of health problems, including cancer and reduced fertility.

“It’s really going to be a full sprint to the finish line for these facilities to meet the compliance timeline,” said Chris Moody, regulatory technical manager for the American Water Works Association, which represents 4,300 utilities that provide drinking water in the United States. “The systems that are going to struggle the most are going to be the small systems. The larger systems are going to have more purchasing power and will be in the front of the line.”

The city of Brighton will spend millions of dollars to meet the new limits, but was able to include mitigation in the plans for a new treatment plant already in the works. The city’s new water treatment plant — currently under construction and slated for completion in 2027 — will use granular activated carbon filters to reduce the amount of PFAS in the water it provides to more than 55,000 people.

Brighton spent about $580,000 to research, test and design the new filter system and at least $8 million to build the filters, said Scott Olsen, the city’s director of utilities. They also expect to spend at least $1 million a year to replace the filters and dispose of used ones.

The cost would be much higher if the city were not already building a new plant, Olsen said. Most providers will have to retrofit existing facilities.

The Snake River Water District last year discovered PFAS in two of the four wells it uses to provide water to about 10,000 people in Summit County, executive director Scott Price said.

Since then, the district has contracted with an engineering firm to explore options to bring the PFAS levels under the new EPA limit of 4 parts per trillion — the equivalent of four drops of liquid in 20 Olympic-sized swimming pools. Potential treatments include reverse osmosis, activated carbon filters or drilling new wells.

“Nobody wants this stuff — we want to get it out,” Price said.

The water district raised $26 million through bonds for its 10-year master plan. The district planned to use some of that money to replace old pipes and increase storage capacity, which would allow for clean water even in the case of a wildfire. If the district has to use that money to remove PFAS, however, the other projects will be postponed, Price said.

Like many water providers, Price doesn’t know where the PFAS in the district’s wells originated, but he’s trying to find out the source.

“We’re already on the path to recovery,” he said. “We’ve acknowledged it and are fixing it.”

In Colorado, state water regulators have a good idea which water systems have PFAS in their drinking water supplies, said Christopher Higgins, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, who is an expert in PFAS contamination.

Fifty-six other water providers in the state have found PFAS in their water but in concentrations below the EPA’s limit, including Aurora, Frisco and Gunnison.

“With the attention people have been giving to PFAS in Colorado I’m not expecting a ton of new locations to be identified,” Higgins said.

Who should pay?

PFAS has been a recognized problem for at least a decade, but it wasn’t until 2020 that federal regulators began signification pursuing regulations, said Gage Zobell, a partner at the Dorsey & Whitney law firm in Denver.

“The problem is: Who is going to bear the cost of doing that?” he said.

The federal government set aside more than $10 billion to help communities test and treat drinking water for PFAS. That money is intended for rural or disproportionately impacted communities.

That’s not nearly enough, Zobell said. Unless there is a leap in PFAS-removal technology in the next three years, many providers will have to raise rates or find money elsewhere, Zobell said.

“For very small, rural areas this could be dramatic and, frankly, I don’t know how they’re going to pay for it,” he said.

Moody, with the American Water Works Association, said the financial burden has been a primary concern among water providers.

His organization estimates that the smaller the water company, the more expensive it will be to come into compliance by 2029. So upgrading a system to filter out PFAS could cost $1,000 to $2,000 per household per year compared to about $50 per household per year for the country’s largest systems.

There are just a handful of companies in the United States that build and install the filtration systems, Moody said. They will go after the larger contracts, leaving the smallest, more rural water companies in the back of the line because those contracts will be less profitable.

“Spreading cost out among households can stack up pretty quickly,” Moody said.

Because Colorado can have wild temperature swings, a new filtration system would require an enclosure to protect the equipment on top of the expense of the actual system. Utilities also need specialized workers who know how to operate the systems, Moody said.

On top of the new PFAS standards, a new federal regulation on lead and copper levels is coming and that also will be costly.

“At the end of the day, water systems are going to have to increase their water rates to comply or pull from other budgets,” Moody said.

A study by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency found that removing PFAS from the state’s wastewater treatment plants would cost between $14 billion and $28 billion over two decades. While the chemicals can be bought for between $50 per pound and $1,000 per pound, it costs between $2.7 million per pound and $18 million per pound to remove from city wastewater, the study found.

What’s next for PFAS regulations?

One avenue to funding PFAS removal could be litigation. Federal officials on Friday finalized a rule designating two widely-used PFAS chemicals as hazardous substances under the same law that regulates Superfund sites. If the designation becomes final, it would expand the types of entities that could be sued for PFAS contamination.

The new regulation places liability not only on PFAS manufacturers, but also on companies that transported the chemicals, used them or released them into the environment.

PFAS enter the water supply when industries release the chemicals, or they wash or flake off consumer products in landfills and into groundwater. Firefighting foam also has contained PFAS and high concentrations of the chemicals have been found where firefighters trained with the foam.

The regulation not only creates an avenue to fund PFAS removal but also dissuades companies from using PFAS at all, Zobell said.

“Anyone who has touched it could be liable,” he said.

Colorado state lawmakers are pursuing legislation that would ban the sale of certain products if they contain PFAS, such as cookware, outdoor apparel, ski wax and artificial turf. The goal of the bill is to prevent the introduction of the chemicals into the environment and encourage companies to stop using the substances on their products.

One thing utility managers would like to see is more EPA regulations for the polluters, Moody said.

“A lot of members are raising the issue of, if they’re finalizing drinking water standards for PFAS, they need to take a more aggressive approach on the creators of PFAS,” he said. “If the levels are going to go that low, we need to focus on where the biggest levels of exposure are for people.”

For example, in Colorado, the Suncor Energy oil refinery in Commerce City dumps PFAS into Sand Creek, which feeds into the Platte River — a source of drinking water for Thornton and other cities in northeast Colorado, as well as a source of irrigation water for agriculture.

Suncor’s new state water-pollution permit, which is awaiting EPA approval, would allow the company to dump up to 70 parts per trillion per day of PFAS into the creek — 17 times more concentrated than the EPA limit. That new regulation only applies to drinking water providers, though.

Yet Suncor’s pollutants in Sand Creek will end up in the drinking water supply and now the burden is on local water districts to filter it out, environmentalists, including a group that has appealed the permit, argue.

For now, no drinking water districts or companies have sued Suncor for their PFAS problems.

But litigation is brewing in other parts of the country. Last year, Thornton sued dozens of companies and people who produce the forever chemicals, claiming they are responsible for the contamination of the city’s water supply.

Christopher Higgins, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Colorado School of Mines, is an expert in PFAS forensics and serves as an expert witness in legal cases involving PFAS contamination in water systems.

“You can identify whose PFAS it is,” Higgins said. “But it does take a lot of careful evaluation. It depends on the level of contamination.”

In Security and Widefield in El Paso County, the U.S. Department of Defense paid for treatment systems after PFAS contamination was traced to firefighting foam used on Peterson Air Force Base.

Higgins said it was important to note that these new standards only apply to the drinking water coming through the taps inside people’s homes, and most water districts in the state do not have detectable levels of PFAS in their supplies, including Denver Water.

That means most people’s greatest exposure to PFAS is in the food they eat, primarily fish and eggs, Higgins said. He is interested to see what steps — if any — the federal government takes to address PFAS in the food supply.

“I’m not expecting the FDA to come out and issue guidelines for eggs any time soon,” he said.