Everyone should have access to safe, clean drinking water. After all, water is a human right. But that right is increasingly threatened every day.
We need to repair our broken water systems and tackle the threats to the safety of our water, like PFAS contamination and lead pipes. We need to make sure that all families can afford clean water and that these invaluable systems remain in public hands.
The WATER Act will do that.
This week, Congresswoman Bonnie Watson Coleman, Congressman Ro Khanna, and Senator Bernie Sanders (re-)introduced the WATER Act, a comprehensive bill to expand access to clean, safe, and affordable drinking water.
The WATER Act reinvests federal dollars to provide $35 billion a year to drinking water and wastewater improvements. It will:
💧 Create up to one million jobs across the economy and protect workers.
💧 Prioritize disadvantaged communities for grants and expand technical assistance to small, rural, and Indigenous communities.
💧 Help homeowners replace lead service lines, remove PFAS "forever chemicals" from drinking water, and upgrade household wells and septic systems.
This month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) announced its first proposals for federal limits on six PFAS chemicals, thanks to years of organizing by you and frontline communities.
Because PFAS chemicals don’t break down naturally, water systems will need to deploy new technologies to remove them from our water. That means that to comply with the new federal standards, water systems will need more support than ever — support that the WATER Act will provide.
Since the 1970s, the federal government has starved water systems of the funding needed for maintenance, upgrades, and operations, endangering the health of people everywhere. The EPA estimates we need at least $744 BILLION to upgrade our drinking water and wastewater systems over the next 20 years.
Nothing short of that will help us meet this challenge. It’s time for Congress to step up and prioritize infrastructure improvements.
Food & Water Watch and its affiliated organization, Food & Water Action, are advocacy groups with a common mission to protect our food, water and climate.
This email was sent to [email protected]— and we're glad you got it because it's one of the most important ways you can reclaim political power, hold elected officials accountable and resist corporate control.We're excited to keep working together to make an impact! But if you need to, you can
adjust your preferences or unsubscribe.
