Water: schoolsites: lead testing.

Assembly Member Connolly’s measure would place lead-testing transparency at the center of school and child care facility outreach by requiring community water systems to collect and publicly share detailed information about every lead-testing outreach effort conducted at elementary schools and childcare facilities. The bill’s findings emphasize that there is no safe level of lead for children and note that schools are especially affected by water quality dynamics, aligning state practice with federal enhancements to testing and notification.

Under the new framework, a community water system must compile and submit to the State Water Resources Control Board a set of data for each outreach episode: the number and names of schools and facilities served, the number and names sampled in the prior year, those that declined, those that did not respond, information related to outreach attempts, and the sampling results from facilities that participated. When a facility declines testing, the system must offer an opportunity to explain the decline by selecting from a predefined menu of reasons, which includes factors such as prior testing under independent programs, participation in routine or government-funded testing programs, coordination with third-party testers, post-2010 construction or modernization, use of bottled water or filtration, ongoing major projects, and logistical barriers. The State Board may add additional reasons and may implement these provisions through a policy handbook, with waivers available for facilities exempted by federal rules or statewide waivers.

The bill directs public disclosure by requiring the State Board to make all submitted information publicly accessible in a searchable online format by a mid-2028 deadline. The presentation would favor exact values where possible, highlight results above specified lead levels, indicate whether results exceed applicable action levels, and provide context on health harms from lead exposure. In addition, by the end of 2028, each community water system would include in its annual consumer confidence report a written note about the availability of lead-testing information on the State Board’s website and provide a direct link to that site. Enforcement for false statements would continue to rely on existing crime provisions, with no separate penalties created for §116277, and the bill contemplates no new state appropriations, instead describing local data-collection and reporting costs as borne by water systems and facilities.

The measure positions California’s approach to testing within its federal-aligned framework while adding state-level transparency requirements, including a formal process for submitting data and a public-facing dataset. It contemplates ongoing updates through a policy handbook and potential expansion of reasons for declining testing, with timelines that require public access to data by 2028 and CCR updates by year-end 2028. Stakeholders—water systems, schools and child care facilities, and the public—would gain structured access to testing activity and outcomes, alongside defined avenues for responding to declines and understanding the information landscape surrounding lead in drinking water.