Water Resources Professional Project Reports

Document Type

Report

Publication Date

Fall 2024

Abstract

The goal of this study is to identify the most burdened New Mexico community water systems (CWSs) and publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) with National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits to be able to provide them with technical assistance to address their issues, such as health-based and monitoring and reporting violations. Additionally, technical assistance can help them access federal or state funding to improve the infrastructure within their systems. The study evaluated multiple factors to determine the systems with the highest level of burden and reported the results as value numbers. The CWSs were evaluated on 10 factors that were weighted as shown in the parenthesis following the factor: health-based violations (15%), monitoring and reporting violations (4%), public notice violations (4%), other violations (4%), serious violator (15%), number of violations (8%), and median household income (MHI) (15%). The POTW analysis included 12 categories with the weighting as shown: current violations (15%), the highest value of four designated uses within a violation (5%), effluent limit exceedances (5%), per capita income (15%), and two Discharge Monitoring Reports (DMR) load over limits (toxic weighted (5%) and conventional (5%)). Both parts of the study used population served count (10%), total threshold criteria exceeded with 29 socioeconomic factors from Climate and Economic Justice Screening Tool (CEJST) (20%), and community resilience zones from Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) (5%). Data were categorized using the GIS-based multi-criteria analysis and using the ArcGIS 10.8.1 platform. The analysis involved raster conversion, reclassification, and weighted sum tools for both CWSs and POTWs. The studies identified the 25 most burdened CWSs and 28 most burdened POTWs. These systems will be contacted to offer technical assistance. Additional research revealed that non-tribal CWSs experienced a greater level of burden when compared to tribal CWSs when using the same procedure. This result may be related to the fact that tribal CWSs receive a dedicated source of grant funding and a high level of technical assistance from multiple entities. The research also showed that not just small systems are burdened. A low population served does not automatically reflect the most burdened community; bigger population can also be burdened. The burdens for smaller systems may be related to limited resources compared to larger systems.

Keywords

community water systems, publicly owned treatment works, GIS

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