A public hearing October 22 on the Woodstock water district budget turned into a discussion of source tracing of so-called forever chemicals.
Water district budgets require public hearings prior to passage, and in most years nobody had spoken at them. This year, things were different.
“Anybody want to talk about water?” town supervisor Bill McKenna asked. McKenna clarified that the hearing was about the water budget, which he said had been increased by $4000 to pay for testing costs.
“Why is this just for the water district? Why shouldn’t it be for the entire town? Don’t we need to determine where the PFAS contamination is?” councilmember Bennet Ratcliff asked.
Ratcliff wanted testing in the general budget, not the water budget. There should be testing in the entire town, he maintained.
“Is it coming from the water district budget, or is it coming from the general fund budget? You say it’s coming from the water district,” Ratcliff said. “So shouldn’t we source-test to see if we need to do this in the entire town?”
McKenna said the town was testing to determine which well contained the PFOS. “It does not include water testing for the entire town,” he said. “We’ve narrowed it down and are working on testing the various wells to determine which wells have issues and which ones don’t.”
“Okay, but that’s not source testing. Source testing is finding out where the contamination is coming from. Are you doing that?” attendee Stephanie Kaplan asked.
McKenna said that wasn’t being done. Kaplan asked why not.
“Because it’s below the standard,” McKenna answered.
“No, it’s below the MCL, which is the maximum contaminant level, which means the maximum amount before you’re required to do something,” Kaplan said.
McKenna closed the public hearing. A budget vote passed 3-2, with Ratcliff and councilmember Maria-Elena Conte opposed.
“I’m going to vote against this because you haven’t answered questions from people in the audience at a public hearing, and you also have refused to answer the question of whether or not there is going to be tracing,” Ratcliff explained.
During the public-comment portion of the meeting, Alan Weber of Woodstockers United for Change called upon McKenna to conduct source tracing and identification, retain a qualified professional to conduct investigations, to identify, regulate and remove sources of PFOS contamination, and provide a schedule of testing dates and results. He also called for establishment of monitoring programs.
McKenna said later that he was following professional guidance.
“We’re following the advice at this point of our town engineer and the health department, who quite frankly don’t see a major problem right now. We’re going to keep looking at it and seeing whether it grows or not,” he said. “At this point it’s actually decreased.”
McKenna was uncertain about what source testing meant.
“In a sense we are doing source testing trying to pinpoint which well it’s coming from,” he said. He termed the idea that it was coming from the illegal fill at 10 Church Road in Shady “ridiculous.”
“And quite frankly, you’d see it up in the wells of all those property owners before you’d see it down by us, and they’re not finding it there and there, and they’re all testing there,” he said. The best opinion, he added, was that it was probably coming from what people flush down the toilet and wash in the sink.
“Every Teflon pan has PFOS in it,” he continued. “You wash your Teflon pan in the sink and it goes into the septic system which leads to the aquifer.” A small local business that made lenses run out of a home had been directly in line with the wellfield. “And God only knows what they poured down the drain,” he said.
Testing for PFOS began only in 2020.
The latest quarterly PFOS test results show levels in the newest municipal well showed Well #1 at 1.41 parts per trillion of PFOS and Well #2, the newest well, at 3.16 parts per trillion. None of the other town wells have shown detectable amounts of PFOS.
The previous test in May showed 2.39 parts per trillion at the pump house, not at individual wells. The levels are below a new EPA limit of 4 parts per trillion, which is not yet in effect. The state actionable limit is 10 parts per trillion.
Some experts have argued that there was no safe limit for PFOS, which is in everything from degreasing agents to household chemicals.
The town’s 2023 water quality report showed 3.86 ppt in one of the town’s wellfields, where previously it had been 0.86.
Join the family! 
