A bipartisan group of legislators has proposed a bill to require the state Department of Natural Resources to warn county and tribal health departments when an exceedance of state groundwater standards is discovered.
The proposed bill, which was circulated for co-sponsorship Monday by Rep. Jill Billings (D-La Crosse), Rep. Todd Novak (R-Dodgeville) and Sen. Jesse James (R-Thorp), would include warnings about the presence of PFAS — even though the state has been unable to finalize a PFAS limit for groundwater.
That provision would allow private well owners to be warned about the presence of PFAS despite the yearslong political quicksand that has mired the effort to enact a contaminant limit for the class of chemicals. The lack of a PFAS standard has been a regular sticking point in negotiations over legislation to spend $125 million already set aside for PFAS clean up.
While the state doesn’t have a PFAS groundwater standard, it does have standards for nearly 150 other chemicals such as aluminum, nitrates and lead.
About one-third of Wisconsinites get their drinking water from private wells, which don’t come with the same warnings that are often required of municipal water systems.
“The public should be able to know if there is any threat to the safety of the water they and their children drink every day,” the co-sponsorship memo states. “This bill would provide Wisconsinites with more knowledge so they can protect themselves and their children from pollutants and allow them to take advantage of local and county-level testing initiatives and state-level assistance opportunities like the Well Compensation Grant Program.”
After the legislation’s announcement, environmental groups celebrated it as a potential win for clean water.
“Wisconsinites have a right to know about pollution that may be impacting the health of their families,” said Peter Burress, government affairs manager for Wisconsin Conservation Voters. “This legislation is a common sense solution that will protect Wisconsin families. It’s unacceptable that so many Wisconsin families could be drinking water contaminated with PFAS, lead, and nitrates — chemicals tied to cancer and birth defects — without ever being told.”
Wisconsin farms applied about 16 million pounds more nitrogen than necessary to their fields in 2022, according to a recently released report from Clean Wisconsin and Alliance for the Great Lakes.
The excess application of fertilizer poses serious risks to public health, raises costs for people who get their water from public utilities or private wells and increases costs for farmers, the report found.
Throughout the report, the environmental groups included input from residents who have had their health and wallets affected by nitrate pollution.
“I own a daycare center, and the mental toll of just staying in business because I did not cause the contamination of my well and yet am expected to solve the problem is exhausting…” Kewaunee County resident Lisa Cochart says in the report. “This could put me out of business. I work hard to provide my community with a service that assures that each child is receiving the best care and it can be shut down because of a nitrate test that I cannot control.”
The report makes a number of recommendations to better track the amount of nitrogen spread on Wisconsin’s fields and in Wisconsin’s water systems while better enforcing regulations meant to protect drinking water. But agricultural industry representatives have said the report places too much burden on farmers — even though agriculture produces up to 90% of the nitrogen in the state’s groundwater.
“Wisconsin cannot afford to delay. The cost of inaction — both financial and human — is rising,” the report states. “A coordinated, science-based policy response is essential to reduce nitrate pollution at its source, protect public health and ecosystems, and ensure clean, safe drinking water for future generations.”
The report recommends tougher state standards for nitrates, improved enforcement of nutrient management plans on individual farms, creating a statewide registration system for manure haulers and requiring regular groundwater monitoring for factory farms. It also proposes collecting data on the cost of nitrogen contamination to public water systems, expanding the state’s existing private well compensation program and increasing the state’s nitrogen fertilizer tonnage fees.
While the report’s recommendations are aimed at a wide range of policy areas and farming is the major source of nitrogen contamination, dairy industry representatives have pushed back on its findings. Tim Trotter, CEO of the Dairy Business Association, told Wisconsin Public Radio farmers are already doing enough voluntarily to address the problem.
“Our work with solutions-minded environmental groups and other stakeholders through a statewide clean water initiative has resulted in tailored changes to programs and policies that open up more opportunities for on-farm innovation that addresses this important issue,” Trotter said. “Reports like this one do little to bring practical, achievable solutions to water quality challenges, and can be counterproductive to progress.”
In the past, the Dairy Business Association has sued state regulators to weaken the state’s ability to regulate pollution sources such as runoff.
The report states that the state Legislature and the courts have limited the authorities of state agencies, including the Department of Natural Resources and Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, preventing them from doing all that is necessary to manage the contamination.
“Because Wisconsin administrative agencies have been severely limited in their ability to establish new regulations, they have relied heavily on voluntary incentives, such as cost-sharing and price supports to incentivize farmers to implement conservation measures,” the report states. “However, it is clear that these voluntary incentives alone aren’t enough to solve Wisconsin’s nitrate problems.”
The report also found that in applying more nitrogen fertilizer than necessary, Wisconsin’s farmers are spending $8-$11 million more each year than they need to — “dollars that could be saved with more precise application.”
More than one-third of the state’s residents get their drinking water from private wells, which are especially susceptible to nitrate contamination. The report recommends expanding the well compensation program, but adds that is just a band-aid solution.
The program also limits participation to residents making less than $60,000 per year and includes a number of requirements that further restrict who is eligible, even if their wells exceed the state’s nitrate standard of 10 milligrams per liter, according to the report.
Instead, the report argues, the state needs to better work to keep nitrates out of the groundwater in the first place.
“Well compensation programs, while vital for near-term relief, are ultimately a stopgap,” the report states. “They do not address the root cause of nitrate pollution. Without stronger upstream controls on nitrate pollution, more families will face the high cost and growing scarcity of access to safe drinking water.”
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