to personal information on offenders, including their conviction records. The state’s Web site does caution that “[t]he information ...should not be used in any manner to injure, harass, or commit a criminal act against any individual named in the registry, or residing at the reported address. Any such action could subject you to criminal prosecution.”[1]
Washington’s sex offender disclosure system has become more rigorous over time. The law has been amended to allow police to disclose relevant information to public and private schools, child and family day care centers, and businesses and other organizations that primarily serve children and community groups. State officials have increased the amount of information required and tightened the timeliness of submission and requirements for updating changes in residence. As of March 31, 2006, 18,943 sex and kidnapping offenders were listed on the Washington public registry. The state does not estimate compliance rates. Parents for Megan’s Law, a national organization that monitors state-level Megan’s Laws, estimates that about one-quarter of sex offenders nationally fail to comply with state registration requirements.[2]
Disclosing Contaminants to Improve Drinking Water Safety
Under the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974,[3] the federal EPA set maximum safe contaminant levels for drinking water and required water systems to notify customers of violations.[4] However, in practice such notification often did not take place.[5] Public attention focused on the health risks associated with contaminated water in 1993 after the largest outbreak of waterborne disease on record in the United States. In Milwaukee, Wisconsin four hundred thousand people became sick, forty-four hundred were hospitalized, and more than fifty died from drinking water contaminated with a microbe called cryptosporidium.[6]
In response, Congress in 1996 amended the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to require that water suppliers, starting in October 1999, provide customers with annual reports on contamination. The annual reports included information on the source of tap water, contaminants found in the water, sources of contamination, and violations of EPA maximum contaminant levels. Their purpose was to allow consumers to make better choices concerning their use of tap water and to encourage water utilities to be more vigilant in minimizing contaminants.[7]
The Milwaukee incident was not the only driver of greater transparency. Americans were losing confidence in their public water supplies. Surveys in the late 1990s found that only three-quarters of Americans regularly drank tap water, and 65 percent increasingly used bottled water or filtered water at the tap.[8] Experts suggested that drinking water contaminants were responsible for as many as one-third of nine hundred thousand “stomach flu” illnesses each year.[9]
Contamination levels varied widely with seasons, rainfall, and waste discharges. Sometimes chemicals and microbes entered systems as water flowed to homes through century-old pipes.[10] The EPA stated in 2004 that 27 of the 834 water systems serving more than fifty thousand people had exceeded federal safety standards for lead at least once since 2000.[11] The water system ser ving the nation’s capital had failed to comply with sampling req uirements a nd had failed to report to cons umers that mo re than 10 percent of tap water samples since 2000 exceeded federal lead levels.[12]
Transparency requirements proved too weak to help residents assess risks or compare the safety of different water systems, however. They did not require consistent
