By Mike Tony
For Charleston Gazette-Mail
Although West Virginia officials laid out goals for easing access to funding for the state’s many struggling public water system upgrades at a meeting of state lawmakers Sunday, they gave a dim outlook when it comes to outside funding being available for systems that need it, despite Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s “Clean, Clear Water Strategy.”
“We do have concerns with ongoing funding,” West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Harold Ward told the state Joint Technology and Infrastructure Committee during its interim legislative session meeting Sunday afternoon in Charleston.
Ward reported that the state is in its final year of support from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, landmark legislation signed into law in 2021 by then-President Joe Biden that provided $1.2 trillion for water, road, broadband, electric grid and other infrastructure.
Ward noted a “continual decline” in annual water state revolving fund support from the United States Environmental Protection Agency for West Virginia, which he attributed to congressionally directed spending grants being “take[n] off the top of” established, eligible state revolving fund monies. Congressionally directed spending is also known as earmarks, through which federal legislators request funds for projects within their home districts.
“So before the monies are distributed to the states, the CDS [congressionally directed spending] has come off the top of those monies,” Ward said, adding that the result is a reduction in state revolving fund support and principal forgiveness — a further subsidy that reduces the amount of principal a state revolving fund borrower is required to pay back on a loan.
West Virginia’s DEP-administered Clean Water State Revolving Fund and Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Funds comprise a program to address water quality problems through facility construction, upgrades or expansions. Congress has resisted Trump administration proposals to eliminate virtually all federal state revolving funding in recent years.
Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Fund-supported projects are drinking water-focused in line with the Safe Drinking Water Act amendments of 1996 that authorized a revolving fund program to assist public water systems in financing the cost of the infrastructure needed to achieve or maintain compliance with Safe Drinking Water Act requirements and protect public health. Clean Water State Revolving Fund projects are more wastewater-focused and provide technical and financial assistance to local governmental entities to improve water quality and public health conditions.
Ward reported a reduction in monies that can be set aside for administration of the programs resulting in a challenge for the state Bureau of Public Health to pay its workers who enforce compliance with and administer the Safe Drinking Water Act.
In 2024, West Virginia had the nation’s highest percentage of public water systems with health-based Safe Drinking Water Act violations — 29.2%, according to a Gazette-Mail analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.
West Virginia’s percentage of public water systems with any kind of violations has climbed sharply from 32.1% in 2015 to 79.1% in 2024.
West Virginia had the nation’s sixth-highest percentage of public water systems with acute health-based violations in 2024 — 2.1% (18 systems total) — over seven times more than the percentages in neighboring Maryland and Ohio and more than double that of fellow neighbor Kentucky.
Health-based violations represent the exceedance of maximum contaminant or residual disinfectant levels. Acute health-based violations represent significant short-term health risks that can cause immediate illness.
West Virginia’s southern coalfield counties have been especially devastated by crumbling water infrastructure and decades of underinvestment, living with water quality failures and high levels of water loss that have left city customers on the hook to pay for water too discolored and odorous for them to consider consuming — if it makes it to their taps at all.
Five weeks into his new role as West Virginia Water Development Authority executive director, erstwhile Glenville Mayor Mark Sarver told the committee his organization, the state’s revenue bond bank that provides financing for construction of water and wastewater facilities to local government agencies, is seeing occasional delays in congressionally directed funding distribution.
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