By Marcel Honoré, The Desert Sun
Sacramento lawmakers took a step closer this week toward helping thousands of east valley residents living in areas with potentially unsafe levels of arsenic in the groundwater.
The state Assembly on Tuesday gave its final nod toward AB 2515, which would require the state's health department to create emergency regulations for so-called “point-of-use” filters.
The filters, which cost $135 to $300 each and resemble a more advanced kind of tap-water purifier, were presented last fall as an effective, short-term solution for the mobile home units on arsenic-tinged east valley parks.
“This has been an important issue for the eastside ... but also for the state of California,” said Assemblyman V. Manuel Pérez, a Coachella Democrat who authored the bill.
Mobile home park owners and residents presently are not permitted to install the filters because the regulations aren't in place, and without the bill, it would take the health department four years to enact them, Pérez said Wednesday.
“Our communities cannot wait that long,” he added.
The bill also authorizes the health department to make state safe-drinking water grant funds available to buy the filters.
It now moves to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has until Sept. 30 to either veto or sign the bill into law, Pérez said.
“We're happy that it passed,” said Anna Vargas, program director for Coachella-based Poder Popular of the Coachella Valley, a nonprofit group that does advocacy work for about a dozen east valley mobile home parks.
“We hope that we can work in the future to implement (the filters) and the community takes advantage,” Vargas said.
A Desert Sun report published in January found thousands of east valley residents lived at mobile home parks with wells that had recently tested positive for dangerous levels of naturally occurring arsenic, ranging from 12 to 91 parts per billion in the groundwater.
Studies have linked arsenic, a naturally occurring tasteless and odorless element, to risks of cancer when ingested over decades at levels of more than 10 parts per billion, according to state and federal health officials. Children are even more susceptible.
“It's been a problem for a while, but we're happy in the last year or two there's been a lot of momentum” to fix the problem, Vargas said Wednesday. “In some cases residents didn't even know what they were drinking.”
The long-term fix proposed by local officials is a pipeline that would connect many east valley parks — roughly from Vista Santa Rosa to Mecca — to safe, treated water.
Such a pipeline, estimated to cost some $22 million, is years away. However, $500,000 in state water bond and federal funds has been allocated for the Coachella Valley Water District to do a feasibility study to make the project a reality, Pérez said.
Marcel Honoré covers government affairs for The Desert Sun. Reach him at (760) 778-4649 or
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
