Audit Recommends Office of Public Health Strengthen Monitoring, Enforcement Efforts To Ensure Safe Drinking Water

An examination of the state Office of Public Health’s Safe Drinking Water Program found that OPH needs to strengthen its monitoring and enforcement steps to ensure the safety of the public’s water, the Legislative Auditor said in a report released earlier this month.

Performance auditors noted several concerns in their report, including the fact that OPH relies on the water systems to collect most of the samples used to test for contamination. The agency has had to do that since 2012 because of reductions in its staff and because of a new federal Environmental Protection Agency rule that requires increased sampling. As a result, OPH cannot ensure that the samples are properly collected, the state auditor said.

Auditors recommended that OPH consider using additional staff hired with funds from Act 605 of the 2016 Regular Session, which increases the Safe Drinking Water fee, to resume collecting water samples. OPH also could use the additional staff to assist with other monitoring requirements related to testing for the brain-eating amoeba and for iron and manganese in drinking water.

In addition, while OPH conducted all of the required sanitary surveys for 1,075 of the 1,208 active water systems between 2009 and 2014, 48.1% of the surveys examined by auditors were not conducted within the mandated timeframes. OPH officials also could not say for certain whether enforcement action was taken against those water systems with significant deficiencies because its computer system is not capable of linking the citations with the administrative orders.

Auditors found as well that the water systems did not always notify the public of violations as required by the EPA and that OPH did not always issue citations to those systems that failed to do so. Specifically, from 2011 to 2014, OPH did not issue citations for 363 of the 1,025 public notifications the systems failed to provide.

OPH also did not always follow up to determine if those water systems cited for violations had complied with corrective actions, and it did not always increase the severity of the enforcement actions when the noncompliance continued.