Does your drinking water come from a well? Most likely your town water does. A bill, SB 121, that is currently in the Resources, Recreation and Development Committee of the House would allow ATV trails to be located as close as 400 feet to your water supply. The bill removes language that would take soil type and other factors into consideration and substitutes a fast and dirty criterion of 400 feet. A busy ATV trail can have hundreds of the machines traveling on it in a single day. ATV engines are unregulated by the EPA and each engine puts out pollution at rates seven times to over a hundred times the rate of a late model automobile, according to the EPA. The gasoline addative MTBE has been known to travel 700 feet per year in certain soil types. A trail 400 feet from your well in these soil types could be contaminated in less than a year.

Here's what you can do:

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Tell your legislator to save our drinking water—defeat SB 121.

This bill has passed in the Senate and will be proceeding to the House floor. Every Legislator needs to know the facts about this bill. Neither Democrats or Republicans have been made aware that this important decision making process is being removed and replaced by an arbitrary fixed distance of 400 feet.

Contact your legislator, preferably by phone or letter but also by e-mail:

Let them know:

• More wells will be polluted without language in the bill that specifies using reasonably available hydrogeologic data, groundwater flow, recharge, discharge, and other data for each well.
• To keep any more of our drinking water from contamination our public policy needs to be conservative. Fast and loose criteria for siting pollution sources puts our future at risk.
• As it is written, SB 121 allows some water wells to become polluted. A reasonable solution would be to specify a range of 400 to 4,000 feet depending on reasonably available hydrogeologic data, etc. as is written in RSA 485:48,II. Everyone would benefit from this, trails could be built safely and water resources protected.

References:

SB 121, the bill in question, in particular note the language that is struck out.

RSA 485:48,II—the specific language from the New Hampshire Safe Drinking Water Act that will be removed from the decision making process for siting ATV pollution sources.