By Mike Tony
For HDMedia
Deep water worries have long been a way of life in West Virginia.
People throughout the Mountain State, namely in the poverty-challenged southern coalfields, have contended with discolored water that stains their household appliances and clothes, leave them with skin rashes and send them trekking up to dozens of miles away for expensive bottled water or water from bacteriologically compromised roadside springs.
Having drinking water you can trust might be priceless, but a report prepared for the Appalachian Regional Commission and published last year suggested there could be a price tag on it by estimating West Virginia’s drinking water needs would cost roughly $1.73 billion when accounting for the state’s 414 community water systems.
That estimate doesn’t account for the thousands of West Virginians still relying on undocumented private wells or roadside springs thought to harbor greater health dangers because they don’t trust their own water supply throughout the state, which a November 2025 Gazette-Mail review found had the highest percentage of health-based federal Safe Drinking Water Act violations nationwide in 2024.
But West Virginia drinking water advocates’ call for the Republican-supermajority state Legislature to draw $250 million from the state’s $1.44 billion Rainy Day Fund for approved, shovel-ready water improvement projects in the southern coalfields, whose utilities have struggled to pay for upgrades to aging, outdated infrastructure amid dwindling customer bases, went unheeded in the 2026 regular legislative session.
So, 52 organizations and local leaders urged United States congressional leaders in a May 7 letter for $250 million to address the most pressing drinking water and wastewater infrastructure projects in West Virginia’s southern coalfield counties.
But that call, too, appears poised to go unheeded by a key congressional appropriations panel, drawing the ire of increasingly exasperated regional drinking water advocates.
The Republican-controlled House of Representatives Interior, Environment and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee excluded the funding requested by the advocates in its draft funding bill for Fiscal Year 2027 released last week ahead of a meeting scheduled for Wednesday to further amend the legislation and advance it to the full House.
“The continued lack of clean, safe drinking water in many Southern West Virginia communities is a public health crisis,” West Virginia Rivers Coalition policy specialist Maria Russo said in a statement responding to the subcommittee’s funding exclusion. “Denying this funding ignores the very real burden communities are forced to carry every single day.”
Chelsea Barnes, director of government affairs and strategy at regional environmental nonprofit Appalachian Voices, compared the $250 million funding request with other initiatives prioritized by the Trump administration estimated to carry nine-figure price tags that could burden taxpayers, including a proposed 250-foot arch in Washington, D.C. and a new White House ballroom.
“The federal government needs to get its priorities straight,” Barnes said in a statement.
A spokesperson for subcommittee Chairman Mike Simpson, R-Idaho, did not respond to a request for comment on the West Virginia water infrastructure funding proposal.
Subcommittee chair heralded nearly $1.8B EPA funding cut
In a May 21 statement, Simpson heralded what he called “fiscally responsible reductions” in his subcommittee’s bill, which would make a nearly $1.8 billion, 20% cut to funding for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
In a statement, the subcommittee touted that planned EPA funding cut and prohibition of the use of funds for diversity, equity, and inclusion training or promotion of critical race theory, an academic and legal outlook holding that systemic racism is embedded in American society.
The subcommittee bill proposes a $713.2 million, 16.2% cut to EPA state and tribal aid grants — a much smaller cut than the nearly total elimination recommended by the Trump administration but still a potentially devastating reduction for communities with aging water and wastewater infrastructure like those throughout West Virginia.
The EPA allocates grant funding to support water and wastewater infrastructure projects through state revolving funds.
The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection has said 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 last year 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.
The subcommittee bill also proposes a cut of $52.5 million (3.7%) to the U.S. Geological Survey, which has provided sampling and other oversight support to state officials to assess threats of toxic, cancer-linked industrial chemicals known as PFAS (short for per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances) in West Virginia drinking water.
‘West Virginians are worthy’
To no avail so far, West Virginia water quality advocates have secured the support of Reps. Riley Moore and Carol Miller, both R-W.Va., in their infrastructure funding push. Moore sits on the Appropriations Committee slated to take up the bill Wednesday.
The bill contains $1.032 billion in Community Project Funding for 1,197 water and wastewater infrastructure projects requested by 316 House members, who may request funding for state or local governmental agencies or eligible nonprofits.
Included in the bill among 10 requests attributed to Miller for her 1st Congressional District are six prospective recipients in counties prioritized by southern coalfield water advocates with funding allotments totaling $4.65 million:
- $1.1 million: City of Mullens Sanitary Board for wastewater treatment facility rehabilitation
- $1 million: Ravencliff-McGraws-Saulsville Public Service District for Glen Rogers water system
- $850,000: City of Montgomery for wastewater and sewer infrastructure improvement
- $850,000: City of Welch for water line replacement project
- $850,000: Raleigh County Public Service District for water treatment plant
- $850,000: Town of Kermit for water meter replacement
Water advocates have been waiting on the Senate to develop and advance its own appropriations plan. The House and Senate would have to come to agree on an appropriations package.
Senate Environment and Public Works Committee Chairman Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., has backed maintaining support for the EPA state revolving funds.
But Capito and Miller both voted against the Democratic-crafted 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, a landmark climate and energy spending package that the Water Program Portal, a nonpartisan federal appropriations data analysis platform, estimated in August 2024 contained $26.4 billion in federal funds for which water projects qualified for, with $7.2 billion awarded.
Miller opposed and Capito supported the 2021 Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, a bipartisan package that provided over $50 billion to the EPA to improve drinking water, wastewater and stormwater infrastructure.
“[W]e’re asking our federal leaders to meet this moment with the urgency it deserves,” Russo said. “West Virginians are worthy of clean and safe drinking water.”
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