WQCC 25-75 (R) Triennial Review - Proposed Amendments to 20.6.4 NMAC, Standards for Interstate and Intrastate Surface Waters

New Mexico's water-quality standards should reflect the science, the full risk of emerging contaminants, and the lived experience of the communities those standards are supposed to protect.

PFAS protections are important but incomplete. The Commissi...↓on should adopt the additional human-health, mixture, and aquatic-life protections to the fullest extent supported by the record and permitted by law. If the Commission decides that any provision requires separate notice or another rulemaking, it should order NMED to begin that process on a publicly funded and enforceable timetable.

Regulation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, i.e. PFAS or "forever chemicals" is a key issue. NMED proposes aquatic-life criteria for PFOA and PFOS. These protections should be adopted without weakening. They recognize that these persistent chemicals can accumulate in water and aquatic organisms and can impair survival, growth, and reproduction.

But aquatic-life criteria do not provide a complete system for protecting people from PFAS exposure. They are not drinking-water standards. They do not, by themselves, adequately address people who consume contaminated fish, the combined effects of multiple PFAS, private-well contamination, contamination moving between groundwater and surface water, or the thousands of PFAS compounds that remain outside the proposed rule.

Human-health criteria for exposure through consuming aquatic organisms, benchmarks for eight additional PFAS, and a hazard-index method for evaluating the combined risk from PFAS mixtures are proposed by Amigos Bravos, supported by the testimony of toxicologist Dr. Jamie DeWitt.

These additions matter because communities are not exposed to one chemical at a time. PFAS move through water, sediment, soil, wastewater, biosolids, fish, wildlife, and human bodies. A regulatory program that evaluates only PFOA and PFOS separately can miss the cumulative risk created when several PFAS are present together.↓

Good afternoon. My name is Elaine Cimino. I am the director of Common Ground Rising and a co-author of the petition that led EPA to designate the Española Basin as a Sole Source Aquifer.

I support adopting NMED's proposed aquatic-life criteria for P...↓FOA and PFOS without weakening them. But these criteria address only part of the PFAS threat.

NMED is looking at PFAS primarily through an aquatic-life lens. That approach does not adequately protect people who eat contaminated fish, communities exposed to several PFAS at the same time, private-well users, or families living near military facilities, airports, wastewater operations, landfills, biosolids disposal, and industrial sources.

PFAS do not reach communities one chemical at a time. They move through water, soil, sediment, fish, wildlife, and human bodies. Evaluating PFOA and PFOS separately can hide the combined risk created by PFAS mixtures.

This issue is personal. I lived in La Cieneguilla from 1998 to 2003, in an area later associated with very high measured PFAS contamination. Residents did not receive testing and warnings proportionate to the potential risk. Communities should not become the state's monitoring system by discovering contamination only after it reaches their wells, food, or bodies.

I ask the Commission to adopt the additional human-health criteria, PFAS benchmarks, and mixture protections proposed by Amigos Bravos to the fullest extent legally permitted.

The Commission should also require enforceable monitoring, laboratory detection limits low enough to measure the standards, public access to sampling data, and a clear process for translating these criteria into permits, enforcement decisions, and fish-consumption advisories.

If any protection cannot be adopted in this proceeding, do not postpone it indefinitely. Direct NMED to begin a publicly funded rulemaking within six months, with firm dates for public notice, hearings, and final action. PLEASE SEE MY WRITTEN COMMENTS

Adopt the protections before you now—and require a binding schedule to finish the work.

Thank you.↓