Today, EPA Assistant Administrator Ben Grumbles announced the release of the agency's Water Transfers Rule, which will protect access to drinking water sources and support public water agencies in providing communities with safe drinking water. The Association of Metropolitan Water Agencies (AMWA) welcomed the rule, calling it essential for ensuring adequate water supplies for communities.
There are about 55,000 community drinking water providers in the United States, many of which own or manage reservoirs, dams, aqueducts, tunnels and other conveyances needed to supply water to their communities. For decades the Nation’s lawmakers have recognized this as essential to providing drinking water.
“The rule simply affirms how water transfers have been regulated for decades, and states will retain the authority they have always had to regulate transfers,” said Diane VanDe Hei, executive director of AMWA, which is an organization of the largest community drinking water suppliers in the United States.
In thousands of instances, providing safe drinking water requires source water to be transferred using these basins and conveyances. A number of communities rely almost totally on such transfers.
Without the rule, local water providers could have been required to apply for National Pollution Discharge Elimination System permits in order to legally transfer source water from one location to another to reach their treatment plants.
“Obtaining a permit could have forced utilities to treat source water from an upper basin before it reached a lower basin while en route to the community water treatment plant,” said VanDe Hei. “This could have unnecessarily required hundreds of millions, if not billions, of local dollars to build redundant treatment plants.”
What’s more, drought conditions have persisted for several years in many parts of the country, and affected water utilities are working hard to ensure continued access to adequate supplies. Water utilities believe that requiring unnecessary permits would have undermined their efforts to maintain water supply services in the face of current and expected water shortages.
“Water scarcity is already a significant problem in many states,” said VanDe Hei. “Without the ability to continue moving water to where it is needed most, scarcity would turn into disaster.”
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More information on the rule:
http://www.epa.gov/npdes/agriculture 
