By Mike Tony
For HDMedia
When it comes to West Virginia’s support for drinking water quality improvements, the numbers haven’t added up.
After West Virginia’s 60-day regular legislative session for 2026 that ended Saturday, they still don’t.
Roughly $1.73 billion is how much a report prepared for the Appalachian Regional Commission and published in August estimated comprised West Virginia’s drinking water needs when accounting for the state’s 414 community water systems.
That estimate doesn’t account for the thousands of West Virginians still relying on undocumented private wells or roadside springs thought to harbor greater health dangers because they don’t trust their own water supply throughout the state, which a November 2025 Gazette-Mail review found had the highest percentage of health-based federal Safe Drinking Water Act violations nationwide in 2024.
But in the quarter-century following the state’s Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Fund beginning in 1998, 179 loans totaling just $315 million — less than $130 million per year, was provided for water system upgrades in West Virginia, according to a 2023 report by state agencies to then-Gov. Jim Justice on West Virginia’s public water system capacity development.
The West Virginia Water Development Authority reported last year that 2025 state match and other state-sourced funding estimates across the Drinking Water Treatment and Clean Water Treatment Revolving Funds, which comprise a program to address water quality problems through facility construction, upgrades or expansions, plus four other common water quality funding sources totaled just over $100 million.
That was still just a fraction of West Virginia’s estimated water quality improvement needs even when coupled with federal match dollars amounting to nearly $90 million across the revolving fund programs and the WDA’s Infrastructure & Jobs Development Council, the Appalachian Regional Commission, the then-Department of Economic Development’s Community Development Block Program and the Department of Environmental Protection-overseen Abandoned Mine Land Economic Revitalization and other reclamation grant funding programming.
From Below: Rising Together for Coalfield Justice, a coalfield social justice initiative of the West Virginia Faith Collective that has advocated for greater water infrastructure investment in southern West Virginia, called for $250 million to be drawn from the state’s $1.44 billion Rainy Day Fund for approved, shovel-ready water improvement projects in the southern coalfields, whose utilities have struggled to pay for upgrades to aging, outdated infrastructure amid dwindling customer bases.
From Below and other water quality advocates say the Legislature and Governor’s Office are guilty of long-term underinvestment in southern coalfield drinking water quality.
But the Legislature never came close to doing so.
House Bill 5525 would have created a “Southern West Virginia Clean Water Fund” to be used in water emergencies or to upgrade infrastructure so residences can get clean water.
HB 5525’s appropriation of $10 million for water quality improvement programs in Boone, Fayette, Greenbrier, Lincoln, Logan, McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Monroe, Raleigh, Summers, Wayne and Wyoming counties would be only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of millions estimated to be required for needed water and sewer infrastructure upgrades in those counties largely devastated by coal industry decline.
“Other people talked about $500 million, some said $250 million,” Delegate Adam Vance, R-Wyoming, himself an underground coal miner, said in a House of Delegates Energy and Public Works Committee meeting last month. “I’m a realist. I’m not going to come and ask for that kind of money even though we need it. It’s a hard stretch for me to believe that I can get $500 million out of this body, out of the Senate and off the governor’s desk.”
Vance was thwarted by a full House procedural vote in an effort this month to fast-track HB 5525 to passage after it languished in the Energy and Public Works Committee, which instead approved coal, gas and oil severance tax breaks that would have cost the state an estimated $350 million-plus through 2031 in lost revenue had they not also stalled in more advanced legislative stages.
House Bill 5585, another bill pushed by From Below and other water quality advocates, never even got a hearing in the committee. That bill would have declared a public health emergency in several public service districts and municipal water boards in Boone, Fayette, Lincoln, Logan, McDowell, Mercer, Mingo, Raleigh and Wyoming counties, making them eligible for Rainy Day Fund appropriations.
The state’s 2023 report to Justice noted common deficiencies among water systems, which have struggled to retain workers and maintain aging infrastructure amid dwindling customer revenue and population bases, went beyond a mere lack of funding, including:
- Little or no long-term (and sometimes short-term) financial planning
- No preventive maintenance procedures or policies
- No budgeting or poor financial planning and tracking
- No health and safety procedures or policies
House Bill 5210, crafted and pushed by Gov. Patrick Morrisey’s office, was meant to go beyond funding, intended to encourage greater public water provider accountability in part by:
- Creating a voluntary early intervention pilot program which would give six to 10 public water and wastewater utilities an opportunity to address critical matters before the utilities end up on the state’s distressed and failing utilities watch list
- Authorizing utilities to enter into regional cooperative agreements to include and encourage shared resources
But although it would have prioritized issuance of loans to public utilities, it drew criticism that it could direct resources away from needy public utilities by allowing private utilities to be eligible for low-interest loans through the Water Development Authority.
HB 5210 would have instituted a one-year mandatory improvement period for utilities on an existing state watch list that could be extended to 18 months if the utility makes a “substantial effort to participate.”
The PSC has overseen 25 distressed or failing water or wastewater utility cases under Senate Bill 739 since 2020, an average of five per year.
The PSC had determined 30 water and wastewater utilities to be potentially unstable as of Oct. 24, according to a “watch list” of such utilities it prepared as required by state law.
But HB 5210 stalled in the House Finance Committee after advancing through the Energy and Public Works Committee.
Legislation threatening to weaken water quality
Instead of passing legislation meant to help water providers, it passed legislation threatening to worsen water quality:
- Senate Bill 641: Gas and oil industry-backed legislation which loosens regulations for some aboveground storage tanks containing potentially environmentally dangerous brine water produced in connection with hydrocarbon storage or production activities nearest to public water intakes
- Senate Bill 256: Weakens a standard for how much selenium an element with toxic effects for West Virginia’s aquatic and potentially human life is allowed in fish tissue
- Senate Bill 586: Bars the Department of Health secretary from developing rules that require public water systems or businesses to have certain backflow prevention assemblies inspected more than once every three years
That prohibition is set to apply to public water supply systems or businesses defined by SB 586 as hazards that could have a detrimental secondary impact on the quality of public potable water supply or cause aesthetic problems.
Backflow prevention assemblies are added to pipes to ensure water flows only in one direction and keep water and wastewater from intermingling. Plumbing experts say backflow preventers should be inspected and tested annually.
Although the Gas and Oil Association of West Virginia and other industry proponents claimed SB 641 would benefit small “mom-and-pop” gas tank operators, a March 2025 Gazette-Mail review found that a proposal similar to SB 641 proposed then would roll back regulations for tanks nearest to public intakes that were operated by some of the region’s largest industrial companies and averaged over one release per month.
“[W]e know the majority of impacted tanks are owned by regional oil and gas companies, not individuals,” West Virginia Environmental Council president Quenton King told the Gazette-Mail Wednesday. “Over the next year, we plan to educate citizens about who exactly is trying to threaten their water quality.”
‘No longer a side issue’
Maria Russo, policy specialist for the West Virginia Rivers Coalition, noted that SB 641 was introduced with more aggressive rollbacks than what was passed by the Legislature, which she predicted would cause less harm to communities.
“While this is a much better alternative than what was originally introduced, we do not want to see any protections weakened that threaten water quality or public health,” Russo told the Gazette-Mail Wednesday.
Russo said the session was proof of “the impact of reducing harm in policymaking.”
Water quality took center stage at rallies at the Capitol hosted by the West Virginia Council of Churches and other advocacy groups throughout the legislative session, occupying a significantly greater space at such events than in past recent sessions.
The Rivers Coalition and other groups hope the political pressure moves the needle more for lawmakers in sessions to come.
“What stood out this session is that safe water is not a partisan issue, and it’s certainly no longer a side issue,” Rivers Coalition communications manager Maggie Stange told the Gazette-Mail Wednesday. “Because West Virginians have spoken out, clean water is now a central concern at the Capitol.”
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