Developing the Appropriate Monitoring Program for Regultory Decision Making (Human Health 2)

Outcomes and goals – Where do we want to end up? – What we are NOT looking for: No magic list, any program will be hypothesis driven in design and dependant upon site specific issues. – Monitoring can identify areas of risk, but also can test performance. Pharmaceticals, DBPs, Industrial chems, etc may be good surrogates for treatment plant performance.

Questions for Design of Program – How low to measure – should be risk based. DO NOT CHASE ZERO!!! – What do you monitor? For human health, for some chemicals highest exposure would be in the home. Treatment performance and needs of regulators. Risk communication is critical: Need to do a good job of communicating purpose to general public – How frequent? More at start-up Less with time

General Issues Transformation compounds – what does the treatment process convert the chemical to. Any system/program must include expert judgment. Improve Research Agenda – “uncertainty is the driver” – trying to answer questions we don’t know the answer to. – To provide information for improved policy decisions

Regulator’s paradigm: – Programmatic pollutants – Contaminant-by-contaminant regulation is of limited use. – Goal is to move to treatment technology approach (improve treatment). Program specific monitoring programs – Chemicals from urban runoff and agricultural sources will be different

Questions: What are appropriate parameters for CECs? – List of analytes needs to be revised/revisited every so often. Use patterns change, new applications for wastewater/biosolids – Where is the greatest probability for detecting a problem for human health exposure: at the tap. Transparency and Risk communication is huge. All information is public.

Criteria used to select candidate analytical methods. – Thresholds should be risk-based for compliance monitoring. Avoid chasing zero. – Standard methods should be used where possible, however need a state organization to facilitate needs for development of performance based standards for non-standard methods. Need money for lab methods.

Non traditional techniques and ecological/human health endpoints – State has a biomonitoring (CECDP) program – If something new is found, need mechanism to get this info to facilitate method development for water monitoring. Possibly liason to meet with Blue Ribbon Panel.