Virginia Regulatory Town Hall
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Virginia Department of Health
 
Board
State Board of Health
 

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9/17/22  5:27 pm
Commenter: Erica H Bottger

Unclear results and some concerns
 

Hello! I noticed you didn't have any comments yet so I figured I point out a few things.  This is as a concerned citizen who is approaching this as a layperson. 

Going thru the documentation of the plans from last year, there's no direct link of the successes or failures of the previous years projects which seems like a huge thing to skip over when presenting the project list for 2022.  

"Projects addressing eligible acute, chronic health/SDWA compliance or public health problems will be given higher priority over other projects. " https://www.vdh.virginia.gov/drinking-water/fcap/drinking-water-funding-program/
Does not seem to correlate with the priority on page 19 of the 2022 PROJECT PRIORITY LIST   with the information given to the public.  Instead the order of priority seems to be sorted by the "Cumulative SRF Amount"  Otherwise it wouldn't make sense for a city with a 15 ppb of (lead??) to be #8 when over 75% of their lines were installed before 1986.  That example is for Pulaski / Town of Pulaski.  It REALLY seems like from a surface level that the priorities levels need to be reevaluated to cause the LEAST amount of harm to the citizens of Virginia .  If there's information missing from the reasoning behind the current choices, they are not easily publicly available.


And I don't actually think this is part of the same award or plan as the "Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act (WIIN) to assist with identifying sources of lead in drinking water in schools and child care facilities"... But just as another comment, it's VERY strange that it's a voluntary program that schools and buildings would have to apply for and not something that is automatically checked on for the wellbeing of the children. Much like food inspectors aren't considered part of voluntary protections that you sign up for. 
  
Thanks for reading and I hope you all have a good week!

CommentID: 128862