AWWA is asking utility members to contact their representatives in the U.S. House of Representatives as well as Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) to urge them to support H.R. 7944 – Water Systems Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) Liability Protection Act.

AWWA and our water sector partners in the Water Coalition Against PFAS – including Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA), Water Environment Federation (WEF), National Association of Clean Water Agencies (NACWA), National Association of Water Companies (NAWC), and National Rural Water Association (NRWA) – are continuing to build momentum for Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) protections through the November elections and the lame duck session set to follow. Direct contact from constituents, including water utilities, is often the difference maker when a member of Congress is deciding whether to cosponsor a bill.

H.R. 7944 was introduced in April by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-Washington) in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) hazardous substance designation for perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) under CERCLA. The bill provides narrowly tailored liability exemptions for water and wastewater systems to ensure that polluters, not ratepayers, are held financially responsible for PFAS contamination under CERCLA. Without explicit liability protections, a water system that removes PFAS from drinking water and disposes of the residuals at a landfill could be treated as a polluter under the law and forced to pay for future cleanup of the site.

This potential liability creates an undue burden for water systems and their ratepayers, who may be forced to foot the bill twice—once for installing the treatment technology and filtering out the PFAS and again for cleaning up a Superfund site. While EPA may not target water systems directly, other potentially responsible parties will. Congress should uphold the original “polluter pays” principle of CERCLA and ensure chemical companies and other polluters can’t shift the cost of their contamination onto local communities.

AWWA has included a templated letter for you to use as a starting point for what utilities send to their representatives. Please feel free to add your experiences, insights and the potential impact on your utility and your state to personalize the letter.

Please ensure you inform AWWA of your outreach on H.R. 7944, either by copying Nate Norris, AWWA’s senior manager of legislative affairs, or by sharing your letter with us after it is sent.

September [XX], 2024

Dear [ELECTED OFFICIAL]:

As a water utility striving to provide a safe, affordable, public service to our ratepayers, we are concerned that the recent designations of perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA) and perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) as hazardous substances under Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) will cause water systems and our ratepayers – rather than polluters – to incur environmental cleanup liability that should be faced by entities responsible for that pollution. We, therefore, ask you to support statutory protections for water systems from liability under CERCLA for Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) to help ensure that manufacturers and users of PFAS, not the public, pay for PFAS cleanup.

From the start, CERCLA was built on a laudable “polluter pays” principle, aimed at ensuring that companies which produced and profited from hazardous substances discharged into the environment are held responsible for their cleanup. Unfortunately, the recent designation of PFOA and PFOS – nondegradable “forever chemicals,” which are now ubiquitous in the environment – as hazardous substances means that drinking water and wastewater systems that passively receive these substances into their systems could face CERCLA cleanup liability simply because an upstream polluter deposited the chemicals in their water supplies.

Due to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s (EPA) CERCLA designation for PFAS – which took effect on July 8, 2024 – drinking water and wastewater utilities like ours are now vulnerable to potential “cost-share” litigation from those who introduced PFAS into the environment. PFAS users and producers can abuse litigation to reduce their own clean-up costs and increase costs on water utilities – costs that are ultimately borne by those utilities’ customers. Even when water systems are able to successfully defend themselves in court against CERCLA claims, the cost of that litigation alone could contribute to the ongoing water affordability challenge.

CERCLA liability will be an additional burden on top of the significant treatment costs utilities are already incurring to meet Safe Drinking Water Act and Clean Water Act PFAS regulations. CERLCA would unjustly make ratepayers pay yet again, now for the environmental remediation that should be borne by the companies that produced and profited from PFAS for decades, and continue to do so.

With the final rule now in effect, it is critical that Congress move quickly to ensure that water systems and their ratepayers are not unfairly punished for PFAS contamination for which they bear zero responsibility or blame. I therefore urge you to support bipartisan legislation, H.R. 7944, the Water Systems PFAS Liability Protection Act, introduced by Rep. John Curtis (R-Utah) and Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez (D-Washngton). This bill would protect the “polluter pays” principle under CERCLA and ensure that water utilities can continue to focus their efforts on maintaining water quality.

Thank you.

Sincerely,
[XXX]