ANN ARBOR, MI -- In the midst of the Flint water crisis and recently heightened concerns about an underground plume of dioxane contaminating drinking water supplies in the Ann Arbor area -- both situations in which it's abundantly clear the government could have done more to protect people -- Michigan Gov. Rick Snyder is looking to change the culture of the state's bureaucracy.

"Clearly what is happening in Flint and what is happening in Ann Arbor is bringing to the forefront the importance of water quality for everyone," Ari Adler, Snyder's director of communications, told The Ann Arbor News on Friday.

Adler said Snyder wants to move away from a culture of checking off boxes on bureaucratic forms to instead taking the extra steps necessary to put people first.

The Ann Arbor News has been requesting comment from the governor's office for weeks. Adler's remarks on Friday marked the first response giving any indication of the governor's current thinking on the dioxane issue.

Adler said the governor is concerned about the plume of dioxane that continues to spread through the groundwater in Ann Arbor and Scio Township, where a family with three young children was alarmed this week to find out they've been drinking dioxane-poisoned well water for the last two and a half years while government officials knew about it and never reached out to inform them of the risks.

Instead, testing of the water was left to Pall Corp., the company responsible for the pollution, and the company told the family the water was safe to drink because it didn't exceed state standards -- standards officials have known for years are outdated and not reflective of the latest scientific findings about cancer risks associated with dioxane.

The dioxane plume that originated years ago from the Gelman Sciences property on Wagner Road on the border between Ann Arbor and Scio Township continues to spread.

Dioxane is classified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as likely to be carcinogenic to humans by all routes of exposure.

The EPA published new findings in 2010 indicating dioxane at 3.5 parts per billion in drinking water poses a 1 in 100,000 cancer risk.

The state for the last several years has maintained a standard of 85 ppb that was intended to result in the same 1 in 100,000 cancer risk.

Local officials have been fighting for years to convince the state to move to a stricter standard to reflect the latest science, only to hear that Lansing politics and technical problems were causing delays and holding up the process.

Because the state has been slow to adopt the latest science, there has been no legal remedy for anyone with dioxane in their water below 85 ppb, and people such as the Pate family have been told it was safe as long as it was below 85 ppb. The most recent testing of their well water by Pall Corp. shows it at 17 ppb.

"The presence of 1,4-dioxane below the drinking water advisory of 85 ppb is safe for drinking and cooking purposes," the company reported to the family on Feb. 10 without disclosing that federal guidelines say otherwise.

Pall Corp. has not responded to requests for comment.

The governor's office said this week Snyder has been briefed on the latest concerns about the expanding dioxane plume in Ann Arbor, where he lives, and he has asked key staff in the governor's office and at the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to monitor the situation closely and keep him updated.

The Ann Arbor News reported this week that residents and businesses in Scio Township have had dioxane in their drinking water wells at concentrations as high as 54 parts per billion, but no action was taken by the state to remedy the situation because it was below the state's longstanding standard of 85 ppb.

The DEQ, under Snyder's administration, was required by law to revise the state's standards by December 2013 to reflect the latest scientific findings. But after years of repeated delays and missed deadlines, that still hasn't happened.

The DEQ acknowledged this week the standards revisions didn't move forward three years ago as required because they didn't have consensus among stakeholders, including the polluters, who couldn't agree on things like whether the exposure assumptions for toxic chemicals should take into account children.

Rather than simply follow EPA guidelines and fast-track a new standard for dioxane that's more protective of public health, the DEQ for years now has struggled its way through trying to simultaneously update the standards for dioxane and 300-plus other chemicals and hazardous substances, with 67,000 data inputs going into the calculations to produce more than 3,000 different exposure standards.

The most recent delays in the process are attributed to technical problems with an electronic risk calculator designed to perform the many calculations.

"I have to question what took the DEQ so long to protect families from this carcinogenic crisis," state Rep. Adam Zemke, D-Ann Arbor, said on Friday.

Ann Arbor's representatives in Lansing have had meetings with the DEQ this week to talk about the dioxane concerns.

Zemke said the DEQ is promising to put forward a stricter, single-digit standard for dioxane by an April 18 town hall meeting planned in Ann Arbor.

"We've seen that the DEQ needs stricter standards so human life in Michigan is given full priority, and I hope the DEQ stays true to their word," he said.

Zemke and state Rep. Gretchen Driskell, D-Saline, issued a joint press release on Friday, indicating they plan to hold committee hearings in the state House to discuss possible legislation to bring the state in line with EPA guidelines if the DEQ fails to have new standards proposed by the April 18 meeting.

"If the DEQ's standards were at the level we're proposing, the high level of dioxane in the water of my constituents in Scio Township would have been caught and addressed years ago," Driskell said.

"We need to make sure we have standards in place so there is accountability and so we can ensure all Michigan families have access to safe drinking water."

State Rep. Jeff Irwin's office has been involved with setting up the April 18 town hall meeting in Ann Arbor at which it's expected the DEQ will give another update on the plume situation and the pending revisions to the state standards.

Details about the meeting are pending.

The state standard used to be 3 ppb back before Republican Gov. John Engler in 1995 enacted new laws weakening the state's environmental regulations and essentially adopting a risk-management approach that allows pollution such as the dioxane plume in Ann Arbor to fester in the environment.

"The law was changed from really a law that required polluters to clean up their mess to a law that required the department to manage exposure between humans and the pollution that is caused," said Irwin, D-Ann Arbor. "And that has been a big part of why it's been so hard to get a good cleanup here in Washtenaw County, why this 1,4-dioxane plume continues to spread. Because not only have we had, I think, an insufficient effort from our regulatory body ... but I also think it's fair to say that our regulatory body is working with a law that isn't very good."

Irwin said the state needs to change its environmental cleanup laws and go back to having a stronger polluter-pay law like it used to have in the 1990s.

Adler said on Friday he's not sure where Snyder stands on changing state law in such a manner, but the governor's office is putting pressure on the DEQ to wrap up the standards revisions process that's expected to move the groundwater or drinking water standard for dioxane from 85 ppb to somewhere under 10 ppb.

"He is concerned about this issue," Adler said. "He has made it very clear to the DEQ that these standards need to be updated, and now we have a renewed push."

Adler said state officials will be taking a close look at the process once it's completed to see why it took so long, what worked and what didn't.

The DEQ has said there needed to be consensus on the DEQ-proposed standards, including consent from polluters, in order to get through the state's Joint Committee on Administrative Rules, the bipartisan legislative committee comprised of five House and five Senate members that is responsible for the legislative oversight of administrative rules proposed by state agencies.

The members of the Legislature who serve on JCAR essentially get the opportunity to veto the new standards, so they're subject to political whims in Lansing. So, if politicians who aren't big on government regulation of businesses don't like what they see, that can be another hurdle to clear in setting new standards.

Going forward, Adler said the governor's office will be looking at what can be done to push ahead with changes more quickly, particularly when public health is at stake.

"This is part of the culture change that's happening with all of the recent incidents with Flint and we're looking at what's going on within state departments," he said.

Adler noted the governor's proposed budget for the fiscal year starting in October includes $16 million in special funding to deal with legacy contamination sites across the state, including $700,000 for the dioxane plume that originated from the former Gelman Sciences site on Wagner Road in Scio Township.

That's expected to cover a wide range of things from better monitoring and tracking the plume to providing alternate water sources to people with contaminated wells, though whether there will be a more aggressive cleanup remains to be seen. Pall Corp. acquired Gelman Sciences in 1997 and is operating under a consent judgment hashed out over the years in Washtenaw County Circuit Court.

Adler said the governor's office has been assured by the DEQ that they would be able to tell years in advance if Ann Arbor's municipal drinking water supply was going to be contaminated by the expanding dioxane plume, so there would be time to react before the plume reaches Barton Pond, the city's primary water source. The private drinking water wells that are being contaminated in the meantime are another story, though.

In addition to the family with three children who have been drinking dioxane-poisoned well water on Jackson Road, the Ann Arbor News reported this week that dioxane in lower amounts also has been detected in other wells used by residents and businesses along Jackson, Wagner and Elizabeth roads.

As of Thursday, the county and the state finally stepped in to provide the family on Jackson Road, as well as two neighboring businesses, with bottled water, and as of Friday municipal water service was extended through a temporary connection.

Irwin said he has drafted legislation to both rewrite the state's cleanup law and require the DEQ to move to a stricter standard for dioxane, but he notes state law already requires the DEQ to update the standards using best available science.

He said he has been meeting with the DEQ regularly for the last few years and the department has made numerous promises it hasn't kept. The DEQ has repeatedly failed to meet deadlines for revising the standards.

As the DEQ is now in the process of working out some of the technical glitches with the exposure risk calculations, Irwin said he's watching closely to make sure the DEQ follows through this time, and he hopes once that happens there will be a renewed effort to better manage the plume and put in additional monitoring wells.

Ryan Stanton covers the city beat for The Ann Arbor News. Reach him at ryanstanton@mlive.com.