Greg Abbott vetoes funding for colonias initiative.
Abbott on Monday vetoed nearly $860,000 in the state’s operating budget slated for the Colonia Initiatives Program in the secretary of state’s office.
The ombudsmen are tasked with assessing residents’ needs and advocating for improvements in communities that often lack access to drinking water and wastewater services.
They coordinate with local, state and federal officials to secure funding for water and infrastructure projects.
“Each of these agencies provides direct client services to Texans living in colonias, while the Secretary of State primarily serves in a liaison and reporting role," Abbott wrote in a document detailing his vetoes.
"It’s a big loss because a lot of these projects are complex, and have a lot of agencies involved, both local and federal," Perez said.
El Paso had 329 colonias with 90,582 residents in 2014, according to a report from the secretary of state.
About 1,967 people in those communities did not have access to drinking water or wastewater.
Lionel Lopez, director of the South Texas Colonia Initiative, said much of the work done in colonias is achieved through volunteer work and nonprofits like his own, not by state offices.
Despite the uneven workload, Lopez said colonias need more attention and funding from state officials like Abbott, not less.

President Trump recently unveiled his infrastructure plan but it did little to address the water crisis in rural America.
Some utilities lack the ability to do appropriate water testing.
Small systems in rural areas account for nearly 70 percent of all violations.
When ranked by population served by systems with Safe Drinking Water Act violations, the top five states were: Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and Georgia.
In other cases, tribal communities or small communities in agricultural areas rely on contaminated water sources.
Rural utilities generally favor expanding the U.S. EPA’s Drinking Water State Revolving Fund, where states can receive grants to provide loans to public water systems for drinking water projects, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Rural Development’s Water & Environmental Programs which provide grants and low-interest loans to rural communities to develop drinking water and waste disposal systems for communities with 10,000 or fewer residents.
For many small, rural communities, their publicly owned water utility can be their most expensive investment.
First, more work — like that of the Southeast Rural Community Assistance Project around education and inequity in access to water infrastructure — is needed is to help identify at-risk communities.
More robust monitoring systems at the state and community level can help to more quickly identify problems in drinking water systems.
A reinvestment in America’s aging and deteriorating rural infrastructure demands financial and technical resources to address these issues in equitable and fair ways.

On World Water Day, a Spotlight on U.S. Public Water Systems.
Editor’s note: This article has been updated to reflect a change in the estimates made by Fitch Ratings, which originally reported that replacing an estimated six million lead service lines across the country could cost upwards of $275 billion.
Fitch has since updated that estimate to “a few billion to $50 billion.” Tuesday is World Water Day, that time of year when the media reminds us that 663 million people globally— about one in ten people—lack access to safe drinking water, the majority of them in the developing world.
Some 100,000 residents in Flint, a predominantly Black city, are still being forced to drink, cook with, and bathe their children in bottled water, after corrosive water from the Flint River leached lead from pipes, joints, and fixtures into the city’s water supply.
The crisis began in April of 2014 when the city, under emergency management, switched its water source from Lake Huron to the toxic Flint River.
This MLive article noted that the governor’s goals include replacing 30 water service lines in an effort to contribute to Flint Mayor Karen Weaver’s $55-million Fast Start program.
An investigation by USA Today released on March 11 revealed that an additional 2,000 water systems across all 50 states have shown signs of “excessive” lead levels in the past four years, impacting an estimated six million people.
Roughly 350 of those systems deliver water to schools and day-care centers, while at least 180 systems violated federal regulations by neglecting to alert consumers about high lead levels, the investigation found.
At an elementary school in Ithaca, N.Y., one sample tested this year at a stunning 5,000 ppb of lead, the EPA’s threshold for ‘hazardous waste.’” Meanwhile, water tests conducted last week in Newark, New Jersey, found that 30 of the district’s 67 schools had lead levels higher than the EPA’s safety threshold of 15 ppb, the New York Times’ editorial board reported on March 19.
In Chicago, where lead service lines feed an estimated 80 percent of properties according to this article in the Chicago Tribune, “city officials still do little to caution Chicagoans about the potential health risks” of lead levels in the water supply, even though a 2013 federal study found that the city’s existing testing protocols likely miss “high concentrations of lead in drinking water.” Earlier this month, the Detroit Free Press reported that replacing an estimated six million lead service lines across the country could cost from “a few billion to $50 billion.” Quoting Fitch Ratings, an international ratings agency, the article also noted that the EPA’s latest estimates for improving the entire water sector ran into about $385 billion through the year 2030, although this projection only included a plan for partial replacement of lead pipes, rather than a complete overhaul.

More than 250,000 people in our area get their water from the Cape Fear River.
At least that’s we thought.
Our utilities have no way of removing the compound — known as GenX — so it is in the water that about 250,000 area people drink.
GenX is coming from Chemours Co., a manufacturing plant near Fayetteville and adjacent to the Cape Fear.
It’s 50 miles upriver from where CFPUA draws most of its raw water.
The compound it replaced, C8, was very harmful — so much that DuPont stopped using it and settled a $670.7 million class-action lawsuit.
GenX has a similar makeup as C8, and Chemours, a DuPont spin-off, has informed the EPA of harmful effects on lab animals.
Is GenX-laced water safe?
We do know the EPA said it cannot get in the water.
Tom Tillis and Richard Burr, Gov.

June is National Rivers Month – a great time to celebrate the rivers and streams flowing through our communities and think about the importance of healthy rivers to our families.
They give us our drinking water.
There are few things more fundamental to the health of our families than clean drinking water.
Let’s use National Rivers Month as a chance to highlight the importance of healthy rivers for all children, and let our members of Congress know that clean water must be a top priority for all Americans.
Your kids need clean drinking water.
Rivers flow through our veins.
As our kids grow up, we want to know that the water flowing from our taps is clean and safe.
Too many communities in our country (it’s not just Flint) do not have access to safe drinking water.
Imagine if our decision makers and members of Congress understood our bodies – their own bodies – as directly connected to the health of rivers and the natural world.
Learn more » Share your river story Why are rivers important to you and your family?

Drinking Water Along The US-Mexico Border Threatened By Global Warming.
Some of the most marginalized communities in the United States are found along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Some people living along the that border already live without access to running water.
“People here, they know how to do it, so they do it by hand,” said Maria Covernali, a colonias resident living near El Paso, Texas.
A 2015 University of Texas Health Impact study reported high concentrations of arsenic and nitrates in the water supply of many colonias.
"The developers take advantage of the people," Corvenali said.
“After we start living on the land, we start to see the problems that we face.” A lot of the people living in colonias haul their water in tanks or buy bottled water.
That is where Patrick Marquez lives with his family.
Marquez said his well runs dry for a couple weeks every year while the farmers are pumping water out of the aquifer.
According to a 2009 Housing Assistance Council Community report, the Marquez and Covernali families are just some of the 1.5 million people living along the border who depend on vulnerable water supplies.

After Flint’s water crisis, a massive bottled-water company faces public scrutiny.
For years, Nestlé, the multibillion-dollar Swiss food giant, has extracted water from the ground in the Great Lakes state to then bottle and sell for a profit.
Nestlé’s desire to spend next to nothing to pump water and Flint’s own drinking water crisis may have nothing to do with one another—but the juxtaposition of big-business profits next to such a marked American failure to respond to one of its own city’s access to clean water is undeniably ugly.
The situation raises the prospect of a renewed debate about how the finances of water should be handled when it is sold as a commodity.
That a company based in Switzerland wants to stick a bigger straw into Michigan’s groundwater supply for a relatively nominal fee (a $5,000 application cost and a yearly $200 water-use reporting fee), and then make millions of dollars in profit off it, is striking while contrasted with conditions in Flint.
In April, Nestlé was denied a zoning permit to construct a pumping-plant booster at a well in a town called White Pines.
It was hoping to double its pumping to nearly 400 gallons per minute and plans to appeal.
One thing is undeniable, the business of bottled water is big.
In the US, the industry pulls more than $21 billion per year, data from Euromonitor shows.
Just under a quarter of those sales belong to Nestlé, the multi-billion dollar food giant that is the world’s largest bottler of water.

June is National Rivers Month – a great time to celebrate the rivers and streams flowing through our communities and think about the importance of healthy rivers to our families.
They give us our drinking water.
There are few things more fundamental to the health of our families than clean drinking water.
Let’s use National Rivers Month as a chance to highlight the importance of healthy rivers for all children, and let our members of Congress know that clean water must be a top priority for all Americans.
Your kids need clean drinking water.
Rivers flow through our veins.
As our kids grow up, we want to know that the water flowing from our taps is clean and safe.
Too many communities in our country (it’s not just Flint) do not have access to safe drinking water.
Imagine if our decision makers and members of Congress understood our bodies – their own bodies – as directly connected to the health of rivers and the natural world.
Learn more » Share your river story Why are rivers important to you and your family?

The drought affects all the communities we work with under the Safe Water Enterprise project, which stretches across large parts of the country.
An operator runs the kiosk, maintains the technology, and works with the management team to ensure sustainability.
Of course, kiosk operations are affected when water availability changes, and most water sources depend on rainfall.
Those using water from dams and rivers struggle when the levels drop significantly, making the water more turbid.
We’ve had to install pre-filters in some of the kiosks to deal with increased sludge.
One of our most recent kiosks, in Howa Mwana in Kwale County, is using water from a dam.
We never thought this dam would dry out, and over the past year, it was the last dam in the entire region still holding water.
But after 9 months without rain and a growing demand from the surrounding communities, the dam eventually dried out, and the kiosk had to close.
On a positive note, the kiosks that remained open throughout the dry months have been able to provide even more people with safe drinking water, as people come from further afield to buy water in times of severe drought.
Award” and the “empowering people.

Why Safe Drinking Water Should Be At The Centre Of Public Health Policy In India.
In urban areas, the problem of poor drinking water and hygiene is only going to increase due to fast urbanisation and pollution.
This is ₹52 crore less than the annual budget of the Union Health Ministry and more than the annual budget of the Education Ministry.
Subsequently, the National Water Policies of 1987, 2002 and 2012 highlighted the concerns of clean drinking water.
Further, these programmes were implemented by the Department of Drinking Water Supply under the Ministry of Rural Development.
This highlights an important issue of the lack of understanding of safe drinking water as a vital component of public health.
Safe drinking water as a public health component Drinking water and sanitation form a major component of population-wide preventive services.
The WHO has documented 37 diseases as the major causes of death in developing countries, of which 21 are associated with water and sanitation.
After 67 years of independence, in 2014, India launched its first mission mode programme to address the issue of sanitation.
For implementing all these measures, it is first imperative to view lack of safe drinking water as a public health concern.