The Pollution-Free Aviation Sites Act and Save Our Airports Reporting Act were recently signed into law by President Biden with bipartisan support. The laws were part of Rep. Salud Carbajal’s 'Clean Airport Agenda' intended to help phase out per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS).
On Tuesday, Rep. Carbajal visited the airport to celebrate their passage.
“I stand here to celebrate these bills, inspired by and crafted with the help of SLO Airport, are now law," Carbajal said.
The PFAS Act “establishes a grant program to support airports as they replace firefighting foams containing PFAS substances (PFAS).” The Save our Airports Reporting Act “requires regular progress reports from federal agencies as airports phase out these ‘forever chemicals.’"
“It's a critical water quality concern," said Central Coast Regional Water Board Chairwoman Jane Gray. "It has been addressed now at the federal level, also through the California Environmental Protection Agency's Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment (OEHHA) at the state level.”
While the new laws will work to prevent future contamination, it’s the mitigation efforts that will be ongoing for communities off Buckley Road.
“There's another civil matter that's going on and that's a separate issue,” Carbajal said.
“They're very engaged and so they are monitoring how well these systems are working for them," explained SLO County District 3 Supervisor Dawn Ortiz-Legg. "That's going to be ongoing for a while.”
In July of 2023, KSBY spoke to resident Kathy Borland whose property across the street from the airport has one of the highest PFAS concentrations in the whole neighborhood. She spoke with us again about what’s changed on her property since the issue began. One change is that their groundwater well now has carbon filters.
But Borland says many others in the neighborhood don’t have that filter. She also says many of the homes only have a filter in their kitchen sink and not other parts of their property.
“They still have a lot of households to date where all they have is a Reverse Osmosis system under their kitchen sink," she said.
According to Supervisor Ortiz-Legg, every business and residence in that area now has at least one Point of Use filtration system on their property.
