U.S. Water News Online
RICHMOND, Va. -- Democrat Mark Warner spent the night with a southwest Virginia family whose well often goes dry and helped lay pipe for a rural water project before disclosing plans for providing clean, safe drinking water statewide if elected governor.
Warner made his announcement in Pound, a town of less than 1,000 people a few miles from the Kentucky border, where fractures in the earth from days before coal mines closed are spoiling or draining once-plentiful and healthy supplies of well water.
It capped a week spent sparring with Republicans over environmental and outdoors issues and began a weekend of heavy campaigning in the state's most remote area, one where Warner has worked for months to reverse a decade of steady GOP gains.
The six-point package offered generalized commitments instead of specific steps to ease water shortages that force tens of thousands of Virginians to do without running water or safe drinking water, especially in southwestern and Southside regions and the Eastern Shore.
``Close to 46,000 households live with incomplete or no indoor plumbing. Almost 17,000 households, particularly in southwest Virginia, don't have safe drinking water due to nonfunctioning or contaminated wells,'' Warner said, citing a 1999 State Water Commission report.
The wealthy Alexandria investor pledged to assign two Cabinet secretaries -- of Natural Resources and Health and Human Resources -- to develop ``a comprehensive statewide water policy'' with emphasis on water quality, quantity, and delivery. He said he would commit to the cause a senior state official who knows how to maximize money for drinking water projects from a confusing tangle of federal bureaucracies.
Warner advocated increased state funding for water projects and encouraged private companies to volunteer their services to improve water systems. He also recommended increased state support for self-help projects such as the one in Pound for which he briefly toiled.
Warner helped lay pipe for the Almira-South of the Mountain Self-Help Water Project for about an hour. The night before, he stayed in the home of Doug Mullins, a member of the Wise County Board of Supervisors.
``The idea of wondering whether you can take a shower or whether you should flush the toilet or ... constantly monitoring your kids to make sure you don't leave a faucet running is a real burden,'' Warner said during a telephone news conference of his stay with the Mullins family.
Southwestern Virginia's water woes and legislation that would have funded improvements figured in one of the sharper disputes this year between the Republican-run state Senate and Republican Gov. Jim Gilmore.
Sens. William Wampler, R-Bristol, and Phillip Puckett, D-Russell County, cosponsored a bill that would have imposed a 1 percent gross receipts tax on natural gas in the region to pay for new water systems. Gilmore, an unflinching opponent of tax increases, vetoed the bill.
Gilmore last month announced nearly $9 million in drinking water grants for southwestern Virginia localities.
Warner's Republican opponent, Mark Earley, is working on his approach to improving southwestern Virginia water quality with Wampler's help, said Earley campaign spokesman David Botkins.
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