The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has allocated $49 million for grants to fund technical assistance consultants to help rural, small and tribal communities to identify critical wastewater and water quality challenges and to ensure those communities receive help accessing resources to support infrastructure improvements.

Many rural, small, and tribal systems face unique financial and operational challenges, including aging infrastructure, workforce shortages, increasing costs, and declining rate bases, says the EPA. 

The grants are to be used by those communities to engage consultants who can assess the most pressing water challenges, as well as to provide training on water infrastructure and management best practices, help the communities navigate the federal funding application process, and strategically invest in reliable infrastructure solutions, according to EPA.

The issues faced by small systems are much like those faced by larger cities, says Jeremy Pollack, the government affairs director of the Water Quality Association, which advocates for the residential, commercial, and industrial water treatment industry. 

“Small systems are experiencing issues with aging infrastructure where they never really had structure investments,” Pollack told The Driller. “What’s needed is not just investing in and building these facilities, but also making sure there are is a workforce there to attend to them.”

Furthermore, there are some rural areas that have extreme water issues, according to Pollack. “There are places in the country that don’t really have running water,” he said.

Those areas “might have been promised centralized water for the last five or ten years,” but they are still having water trucked in because states are not to going to spend “money to build a whole system to pipe water out to a community of 20 people,” he said.

In such cases, the solution rather than trying to connect those areas “with a city that might be pretty far away, it seems to just be a lot more affordable in some of these scenarios,” to provide these systems with decentralized systems, or wells, according to Pollack.

“Decentralized solutions that are pretty cost effective and readily deployable make a lot of sense for these types of communities,” he said, and, when it comes to wastewater, the EPA’s notice of funding availability lists four priorities that guide the funding, which includes support for decentralized wastewater systems. 

The four priorities are:

• Acquisition of Financing and Funding: This priority requires assistance be provided to rural, small, and tribal communities in planning for and accessing funding from the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (also known as the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law) and from other sources.            
• Protection of Water Quality and Compliance Assistance: This funding will help rural, small, and tribal communities improve their technical, managerial, and financial capacity and maintain compliance.
• Tribal Wastewater Systems: This area provides training and technical assistance to tribes across all areas of their clean water infrastructure.
• Decentralized Wastewater Systems: More than 20 percent of households in the U.S. rely on septic systems and other decentralized systems, and this priority area focuses on assisting those communities.