U.S. Senators Tammy Baldwin (D-WI) and Susan Collins (R-ME) introduced the bipartisan Healthy Drinking Water Affordability Act, or the Healthy H2O Act, to provide grants for water testing and treatment technology directly to individuals and non-profits in rural communities. Wisconsin continues to identify new sources of contaminated water and soil from chemicals like PFAs, but many smaller communities lack the resources to conduct testing to identify them and mitigation to remove them.
The Healthy H2O Act would provide grants for water quality testing and the purchase and installation of point-of-use or point-of-entry water quality improvement systems that remove or significantly reduce contaminants from drinking water. Grants would be provided by the U.S. Department of Agriculture directly to individuals and to non-profits in rural areas, specifically to those in communities with a population under 10,000, to help people test their water and install a water treatment product if needed. According to the most recent census, Wisconsin has 714 towns that have populations under 10,000.
Across the United States and in Wisconsin, communities face threats to their drinking water from a number of contaminants, including lead, arsenic, nitrates, volatile organic compounds (VOCs), PFOA, PFOS, hexavalent chromium-6, and others. The Healthy H2O Act will provide grants for those living in rural communities to increase access to the many technologies for testing and water treatment at the point of use.
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