Amid Trump Admin Plan To Gut Key Drinking Water Upgrade Funding, ‘Bill Is Coming Due’

Muddy water. Subpar water maintenance. Water leaks. Frequent water outages. Malfunctioning fire hydrants. A lack of boil-water notices.

Those are some of the shortcomings alleged by residents from the Town of Gilbert and the Justice area in Mingo County that led to the West Virginia Public Service Commission ordering a staff investigation in January 2025 to determine whether the Mingo County Public Service District could maintain adequate facilities “to provide reasonable, safe, and sufficient service to the public” and whether its management was “grossly and willfully inefficient and unresponsive to the needs of its customers.”

PSC staff had prompted the unresolved case by requesting the general investigation, citing state health department violations issued for failures to:

• Submit complete and accurate monthly operational reports
• Comply with primary drinking water regulations
• Provide customers with boil water notices
• Address major violations outlined in sanitary surveys

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“With our water off for hours, days and weeks at a time, it causes hardship to all customers as well as the schools, businesses, elderly and the disabled,” Anita Adams of Delbarton, Mingo County, wrote in an April 11 comment to the PSC.

In a Dec. 19 filing, the district reported $587,000 in funds from the Mingo County Commission to address needed projects and upgrades and pay off or pay down debts owed to vendors, plus a nearly $300,000 West Virginia Water Development Authority critical needs grant to cover system upgrades and installations. The district said its general manager was working with staff to address line flushing and training on preparation and timing of reports.

The general manager, Chris Varney, took over in March and told the Gazette-Mail in a phone interview that funding and manpower are the biggest problems plaguing the 15-employee, 5,000-customer district.

“Every problem in the world is some combination of finding money,” Varney said, adding he was working on a redesign process to address the plant’s lack of means to process settled dirt out of water.

The Legislature, Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., Gov. Patrick Morrisey and the Water Development Authority, a state revenue bond bank that finances construction of water and wastewater facilities as well as economic development projects, all have been criticized for not committing more funding to clean water initiatives.

The $961 million the state was estimated in an American Society of Civil Engineers report released last month to have spent on water and sewer projects from 2017 to 2024 is less than quadruple the $244.5 million the state Treasury projected in September that just the 2026-27 school year budget would be for the Hope Scholarship if 100% of newly eligible students participated in the scholarship — the state’s nonpublic school vouchers program that provides families public money to have their children leave the public school system.

And that $961 million over seven years falls short of the roughly $1.73 billion that a report prepared for the Appalachian Regional Commission and published in August estimated comprises West Virginia’s drinking water needs when accounting for the state’s 414 community water systems.

The report on drinking water and wastewater infrastructure funding needs and gaps in the 13-state Appalachian region found that rates of monitoring and reporting violations are higher inside than outside the region.

Comparisons of bottled water sales and federal Safe Drinking Water Act violations suggest that Appalachian households may turn to bottled water during times that centralized water systems are out of compliance, regardless of the type of violation, the report found, suggesting a persistent and costly lack of trust among West Virginians and other Appalachians beset by drinking water violations.

“I believe that we as Mingo [C]ounty residents have gone long enough facing water outages, discolored water, low water pressure, unsafe water, having to buy water from stores for our daily use causing financial hardship, etc,” Adams wrote to the PSC.

But West Virginians are paying even more than their Appalachian neighbors for water they can’t trust, according to the report.

West Virginia has the region’s highest average annual water bills, with roughly 80% exceeding $500 annually, while only 18% of all bills in Appalachia exceed $500, per the report. McDowell and Mingo counties have the region’s third- and fourth-most expensive bills for water and wastewater services as a percentage of their medium household income, per the report — with Roane, Greenbrier and Pocahontas counties having the sixth-, seventh- and eighth-most expensive bills, respectively.

McDowell County’s percentage of people in poverty in 2023, 36.2%, was the state’s highest and more than triple the national rate.

West Virginia had the country’s highest percentage of public water systems with health-based federal Safe Drinking Water Act violations — 29.2% — in 2024, according to a Gazette-Mail analysis of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency data.

Health-based violations represent exceedance of maximum contaminant or residual disinfectant levels.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection publishes an annual Intended Use Plan listing state priorities for water and wastewater infrastructure improvement projects to draw from the state’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund and Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Fund. The funds comprise a program to address water quality problems through facility construction, upgrades or expansions.

That program is federally rooted, consisting of federal-state partnerships that provide low-cost financing to communities for wide-ranging water quality infrastructure projects.

West Virginia’s fiscal year 2026 Intended Use Plan lists $93.1 million in new funds available for the year for the state’s Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Fund, with more than $35.8 million of that coming from just two federal grants via Environmental Protection Agency base grant funding and a grant through the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act.

The Drinking Water Trust Revolving Fund gives financial support to public water systems to finance eligible infrastructure improvements to comply with the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. The program was authorized via federal Safe Drinking Water Act amendments in 1996 to aid public water systems in financing the cost of infrastructure needed to comply with the law’s requirements. Typical fund-supported projects have included water treatment plant upgrades, distribution and storage upgrades and water system extensions.

Three categories — public health, regulatory compliance and affordability — are used to determine project scoring. Projects that apply for Drinking Water Trust Revolving Fund funding are ranked and are listed in a project priority list. The highest-ranked projects on the list are contacted concerning their project status to determine if support from the fund is appropriate and the project is ready to proceed. The ranking system allows for higher public health ranking for utilities that have multiple violations.

Eight Mingo County Public Service District projects are on the 2026 priority list with costs totaling more than $58 million.

The highest-ranked project, a $10 million endeavor slated to include installation of a new raw water intake, two new filters and replacement of a sludge-handling system to help the district water treatment plant run smoother, is slotted 17th in the list ranking, suggesting a great need for infrastructure upgrades elsewhere.

But the Trump administration has threatened to significantly further hobble the state’s already underfunded position when it comes to drinking water infrastructure funding support.

“[I]t's terrifying,” Leigh-Ann Krometis, an associate professor and public health researcher at Virginia Tech who has studied central Appalachian water access and quality, said in a phone interview of the Trump administration’s budget proposal to wipe out nearly all federal support for the federal Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Fund and Clean Water State Revolving funds. “And it's right at the point where, in my view, the bill is coming due.”

EPA claims it's protecting the 'taxpayer's dollar'

Krometis, one of nearly two dozen project team members who contributed to the Appalachian Regional Commission-published regional water infrastructure needs report, recalled significant water infrastructural investments and regulations in the decades following World War II.

“We really did, as a country, invest in infrastructure and put in good stuff,” Krometis said. “But everything has a design life, I tell my students. And a 50-year design life makes sense. So if we put in stuff in the ‘70s, the bill is coming due.”

The Trump administration has proposed 87% and 91% fiscal year 2026 decreases for West Virginia’s Drinking Water Treatment Revolving Fund and Clean Water State Revolving Fund infrastructure assistance allotments, respectively. President Donald Trump’s EPA has proposed cutting a combined $32.1 million from what had been a fiscal year 2025 allotment of nearly $35.9 million covering the two funds for West Virginia, according to the EPA’s budget proposal.

In the proposal, the EPA contends it is “returning the responsibility of infrastructure funding to the states to leverage the strongest return on investment towards these projects per taxpayer’s dollar.”

'Either privatized or completely abandoned'

The West Virginia Department of Health said in an email from Department of Environmental Protection Chief Communications Officer Terry Fletcher that a substantial cut in funding likely would result in a reduction in state staff.

That, in turn, would inhibit the state’s ability to provide technical assistance, emergency response, certification of operators for water and wastewater facilities, compliance and enforcement needed to protect public health and meet the requirements to maintain the state’s drinking water enforcement authority, per the Department of Health.

The DEP said in an email response from Fletcher the state revolving funds are “key financing tools” and that a funding reduction of the size proposed by the EPA would mean fewer projects, longer wait times and higher local costs for drinking water and wastewater improvements.

“Because principal forgiveness grants are tied to federal capitalization funds, the program would shift to an all-loan model, greatly reducing affordability for disadvantaged communities,” the DEP warned.

“A lot of people are going to die,” the Rev. Caitlin Ware, codirector of From Below: Rising Together for Coalfield Justice, a coalfield social justice initiative of the West Virginia Faith Collective that has advocated for greater water infrastructure investment in southern West Virginia, predicted regarding the Trump EPA’s budget cut proposal.

Ware cited a 2024 letter from the investor-owned West Virginia American Water estimating it would cost $180,000 to extend water service via 2,800 linear feet of pipe in the Boone County community of Bob White, a move the company indicated would cover just four residential homes.

Ware observed there are nearly 200 projects ranked on the DEP’s 2026 Drinking Water State Revolving Fund priority list.

“[H]ow many can actually be completed by the state alone when most are multi-million dollar projects?” Ware asked.

In April, Trump pledged to “make America’s showers great again” in an executive order that directed the Department of Energy to rescind a rule that redefined “showerhead,” alleging an “Obama-Biden war on water pressure.”

But Ware said that in southern West Virginia communities like Alum Creek in Kanawha and Lincoln counties, Avondale in McDowell County and Brenton in Wyoming County, showers leave rashes on residents’ skin.

“Our water systems are already underfunded and this will ensure they become either privatized or completely abandoned,” Ware said.

The EPA declined to comment on the potential adverse funding impacts predicted by the DEP and Department of Health.

Instead, the agency said it supports what it called Trump’s budget request, touting other EPA water infrastructure programs, like technical assistance provisions and the WIFIA program, established by the Water Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act of 2014.

That program provides federal credit for eligible water and wastewater infrastructure projects but has limits on project eligibility, including a $5 million minimum for communities with a population of 25,000 or less and a 49% cap on the portion of eligible costs it can fund.

The U.S. Senate and House Appropriations committees lifted hopes of minimizing water infrastructure funding disruptions this week by advancing fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills that would preserve the current $2.7 billion-plus allocated for the Drinking Water Treatment Revolving and Clean Water State Revolving funds.

But the Trump administration’s move to slash nearly all that funding has exposed how reliant on federal support West Virginia is and will continue to be under Trump and any future federal or state leaders that threaten to put taxpayers and ratepayers further on the hook for water that many don’t even trust.

“Our water systems are already underfunded,” Ware said, “and this will ensure they become either privatized or completely abandoned.”