(YAKIMA, Wash.) A top Seattle-based EPA official’s recent public statement claiming the federal agency is involved and collaborating with local efforts in the lower Yakima Valley on groundwater nitrate contamination doesn’t pass the Pinocchio test.

In fact, some involved in the Lower Yakima Valley Groundwater Management Area (GWMA) effort–developed expressly to address this issue–-say EPA Region 10 Deputy Regional Administrator Dan Opalski’s Dec. 18 comments couldn’t be further from the truth. Yakima County, Yakima Health District, the local dairy community, the state departments of Health, Ecology and Agriculture, and various other agencies and community groups are all involved in the GWMA process.

Save Family Farming is demanding that EPA Region 10 leadership not only start telling the truth about their lack of community involvement, but actually come to the table to collaborate with the community and state partners already having success working on groundwater nitrate issues.

“In a nutshell, EPA is MIA,” said former Washington State Representative David Taylor, who has represented the Washington State Dairy Federation in GWMA meetings for the last several years. According to Taylor, during that time, EPA representatives were virtually absent from the monthly meetings. “With the exception of one or two instances, EPA hasn’t been involved,” he said, “and when they have been involved, they’ve been uneducated, they’ve been unaware… I’m not sure that anybody with EPA has actually ever read the implementation plan,” said Taylor.

In December, U.S. District Court Judge Thomas O. Rice granted EPA’s request for a preliminary injunction forcing three lower Yakima Valley dairies to test wells and provide drinking water to area residents. The emergency measure followed the federal agency’s lawsuit against the dairies in June 2024.

But in a recent news release, Yakima County Commissioner Amanda McKinney said the county has already made free well testing, water treatment options and bottled water available. She echoed a legal declaration from fellow commissioner LaDon Linde expressing concern about EPA’s plan for redundant efforts. McKinney said EPA’s legal moves have “unnecessarily caused alarm.”

In addition to calling on EPA to immediately commit to begin participating and collaborating in GWMA meetings, Save Family Farming also continues its call for an urgent leadership and staffing shakeup at the troubled federal agency’s offices in Seattle.

“Rather than collaboration, EPA Region 10 has for years wielded disproportionate and aggressive enforcement that has pushed family farms to the brink and, in many cases, into extinction. This cannot be allowed to continue,” said Ben Tindall, Save Family Farming Executive Director.