ANN ARBOR, MI - Candidates competing to represent Ann Arbor's west side on the county board agree more needs to be done to address the Gelman dioxane plume, which is spreading through the area's groundwater toward the Huron River.

If it ever contaminates Ann Arbor's main drinking water supply, Barton Pond, it's a problem that could cost tens of millions of dollars to address, and possibly even more if the city is forced to hook up to Detroit's water system.

An estimate of the extent of the Gelman dioxane plume. Plume boundaries shown here are based on a map created by Washtenaw County in February 2016.

The plume poses a

more immediate threat to private wells

in surrounding township areas, many of which already have been contaminated over the years.

Jen Eyer, Jeff Hayner and Conan Smith -- three candidates for the District 9 seat on the Washtenaw County Board of Commissioners -- shared their views on the topic during a forum hosted by the League of Woman Voters this week.

Hayner and Smith both discussed the idea of putting local taxpayer dollars toward solving the problem, with Smith suggesting putting it to voters.

"There are alternative ways for us to invest in that cleanup directly. The county can be putting additional dollars to that. I think we should put a question like that before the voters for sure," Smith said.

In a followup conversation, he suggested the idea of a $30 million bond proposal to help fund a better cleanup of the Gelman plume.

"The other avenue there, of course, is to consider Superfund designation by U.S. EPA," Smith said. "That's something we should be holding in our back pocket in the event that working with the state and working locally doesn't pan out for us."

Hayner said he has been advocating for something to be done for quite some time and he thinks the city of Ann Arbor has dropped the ball.

He spoke out at a City Council meeting in February and encouraged the city to take direct action by creating a "1 Percent for Water" fund. He suggested it could be funded by taking 1 percent of all new development hookup fees, 1 percent of every water and sewer bill, and at least 1 percent of the Downtown Development Authority's annual tax revenue, and placing it in a special fund.

Hayner said the money could be used to safely clean the city's drinking water and remove dioxane if and when it comes to that.

"Don't entrust our clean water future to others," he said in February. "We need to start saving 1 percent for water now."

Hayner brought up the idea again at Monday night's candidate forum, saying the county could do something similar, too.

He said the county doesn't collect water bills like the city does, but different communities affected by the issue could put money into a fund.

"I think we should be saving now to clean the water when we have to and if we have to," he said, adding he has been relieved to see some progress on the issue this year as local officials have put pressure on the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality to update the state's dioxane standards.

"It looks like we're going to get some progress," Hayner said, though he added he has more faith in county leaders than city leaders to continue pressing the issue.

"I kind of threw in the towel on the city, and I'm putting a lot of faith in the county to have a little more impact, because the county residents that are outside Ann Arbor city water are much more impacted than the city is," he said.

The $30 million bond amount cited by Smith is based on a rough estimate of what it might take to clean up the plume of dioxane, which was released into the environment by Gelman Sciences decades ago on Wagner Road, just west of Ann Arbor in Scio Township.

An amendment to a consent judgment in Washtenaw County Circuit Court in March 2011 required Gelman Sciences to provide and maintain a financial assurance mechanism to cover the costs of remediation for 30 years, as if performed by contractors working for the state of Michigan.

As a result, Gelman Sciences, which is now controlled by Pall Corp., which was acquired last year by Danaher Corp., provided a letter of credit for $28.4 million, which the DEQ believes is enough money to complete the cleanup if the company ever was financially unable to finish the job. For 2015, the annual remediation cost reported by Gelman was $1,232,438.

The company has spent millions doing pump-and-treat remediation over the years to remove dioxane from the groundwater. However, the rate of pumping and treating has slowed in recent years and some want to see it increased.

The company is permitted to extract and treat 1,300 gallons per minute, and at one time it was approaching that. The average monthly pumping rate for active extraction wells was 1,115 gallons per minute in April 2011, but it was down to 487 gallons per minute as of earlier this year.

The DEQ has given no indication it will press the company to do more pumping and treating to more aggressively remove the toxic chemical from the environment.

Hayner said he's open to the idea of putting a $30 million bond proposal before local voters to fund an accelerated cleanup.

"We've spent more for less worthy causes, that's for sure," he said in an email on Tuesday, Oct. 11, though he added he would need to see details about administering the fund, and the rights and access available to the administering body (which he assumes would be Washtenaw County Water Resources Commission) to implement the cleanup plan, and a timetable.

"MDEQ told me $30 million, which I think is more like $50 million, to be honest," Hayner said of the estimated cleanup costs. "Either way, it's less than $100 for every person in the county. It would be great to see it tied to some sort of fund matching by the current owner of the site, Danaher."

Hayner said it's a shame that local taxpayers would be "left holding the bag," but it's taken too long to properly address the issue.

"If we had assurances that the cleanup methods would work, I say let's try it," he said. "It's not going to help with making Washtenaw County more affordable, but that's not the only standard by which we should judge our actions. And low-income households could be exempted through some means. Every year we wait, it gets bigger and harder to contain and treat -- and therefore more costly. We should have jumped on this years ago, but lacked the political will."

Eyer isn't so sure.

"I am open to all options on the table, however I have a real problem with the notion of asking taxpayers to foot the bill when there is a responsible party already on the hook -- a responsible party that, by the way, is a $60 billion company," she said. "It's not right. We need to get the new standard in place, then revisit the consent judgment and push for accelerated cleanup by the party who owns this mess."

Eyer notes the state is now three years past a statutory deadline to establish new dioxane standards consistent with current available science.

"It is absolutely unconscionable that we are still waiting for the Legislature to adopt these new standards that have been proposed," she said. "Industry lobbyists are now once again trying to derail the process, and this is absolutely unacceptable."

Eyer said some are hopeful new standards for dioxane will be adopted by the end of the year and she hopes they're right.

"It is far, far overdue," she said. "We need to get that new standard in place so that we can revise the consent agreement that oversees the cleanup. The other thing that I would like to see happen is I would like to see the DEQ support efforts to push the company, which is now owned by Danaher, for more cleanup.

"So far they have not indicated they would, but we need accelerated cleanup so we can get more of that contaminated water out of the ground before it reaches the Huron River and becomes a catastrophic event for our water system. So that is something that I will continue to fight for as a commissioner."

As far as the idea of a federal Superfund cleanup, Eyer said she thinks that's "probably kind of a pipe dream, if you could even call it that."

Smith, who lives atop the plume's expanding eastern edge, said he has a long family history with the problem.

"My mother was a staffer to Sen. Lana Pollack when it first emerged, and she dealt with it as a staff person and as a legislator," he said, recalling the early years after the plume's discovery in the 1980s.

"My wife deals with it as a legislator," Smith said of the plume today. "And I've been working on it since I got elected to office 12 years ago."

Smith said he created the local Coalition for Action on Remediation of Dioxane to monitor the state DEQ's enforcement actions with regard to the Gelman plume and advocate for remediation. The group remains active today.

"It is a challenge," he said. "It's a nut that's been tough to crack. To Jeff's point, the city has found itself in a position where it doesn't have strong legal standing. The county doesn't have any legal standing, either. So, I think the first thing that we need to be doing is working with our judges to make sure that the local governments' interests are represented in the courtroom as well."

Smith said the state is in the process of considering adopting stricter standards for dioxane that would limit it to "an almost-clean level." The allowable level for residential drinking water would go from 85 parts per billion to 7.2 ppb.

"And we all need to be very aggressive and very forceful in supporting that reform," Smith said.

Roger Rayle, a citizen activist who has been closely involved in discussions about the plume for more than two decades, complains that the $28.4 million letter-of-credit amount was based on a cleanup standard of 85 ppb when it was known that the standards would have to be tightened.

"Several other assumptions are troubling," he said.

Biggest challenge facing county

Following the discussion of the Gelman plume, the three candidates were asked what they think is the biggest challenge facing the county.

"I think undoubtedly the economic inequality that we're seeing across the county is the thing that we have to grapple with the most as a county," Smith said.

"It impacts every aspect of people's lives -- their health, their ability to earn a living wage, the safety in their neighborhoods. We have to have a more aggressive set of strategic interventions around inequality at the neighborhood level."

He said the county recently endorsed a visionary affordable housing plan. He said the county should put money behind it.

"A great example of that coming up is going to be the redevelopment of the site on Platt Road," he said. "I believe the county board of commissioners will support affordable housing on that site. Certainly if I'm back on the board, I'll do that."

Beyond that, Smith said, the county is seeing emerging correlations between race and poverty that are unacceptable.

"So our economic development strategy for the county has to start thinking about reducing that gap," he said. "We have the highest average income of any county in the state. We have the lowest unemployment. But we have the highest inequality. So, resolving that difference -- making sure that everybody in the county has the opportunity to earn a living wage -- has to be a high priority."

Eyer also said she wants the county to do what it can to address economic inequality.

She said that's a big passion of hers and something she has worked on through the Dicken Elementary School PTO in recent years.

"We have a lot of kids there who are economically disadvantaged, and I'm really proud of the work that we've done there to support programs that help our families in need and that help those kids come to school ready to learn every day," she said. "I think we've made some good strides there."

Eyer said what she has seen at Dicken is a microcosm of what's happening in a growing way across the county.

"We have pockets of the community that are doing very poorly, as opposed to other areas that are doing very well," she said. "We cannot move forward as a county with that sort of income inequality. We've got issues related to affordable housing. We have racial disparities in terms of outcomes in health and education and those sorts of things. So, the board has very recently started an initiative to address inequality, and I would support continuing that."

Hayner agreed that's a problem facing the county. He cited a statistic that one in five Ann Arbor Public Schools students qualify for free and reduced-price lunches, meaning one in five children are at the poverty level.

"It's something that needs to be looked at," he said. "But as far as the health of the county goes itself, I mean, I have a lot of concerns."

He went on to raise concerns about the county's budget and unfunded pension liabilities.

"If I was elected to the board, I'd give the books a good going over and see if we can take care of that, pay some of those things off a little earlier," he said.

Smith responded to that by saying the county passes a balanced budget every year and there are no structural deficits.

"The county also passes a four-year budget. We're the only unit of the government in the state of Michigan that takes that long-term perspective, so our fiscal house is actually quite strong," he said.

"When it comes to our pension plan, we make the actuarially required contribution to that plan every year," he added.

Smith said the county still grapples with budget cuts every year because revenues don't come in at the same rate that expenses increase.

Eyer, who holds the District 9 seat now, and Hayner are running as write-in candidates. Smith, who recently resigned from the seat and was replaced by Eyer, is the only candidate actually on the ballot. Read more about the race.