April 2004

• Annual Association of State Drinking Water Administrators (ASDWA)/Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Data Management Users Conference, Denver, Colorado, May 3-5, 2004
• Business Case Report for Underground Injection Control (UIC) Data Base Complete
• Annual Safe Drinking Water Information System/State-Version (SDWIS/STATE) Users Group Meeting, Denver, Colorado, May 5-7, 2004

The annual ASDWA/EPA Data Management Users Conference was very well attended this year with 110 state and EPA participants (36 different states and 6 different regions). The conference theme was "Driving Forces in Data Management" and the major topics centered around SDWIS modernization activities. Some highlights of the meeting included:

• The Office of Ground Water and Drinking Water (OGWDW), Deputy Office Director, Nanci Gelb, informed the group that the replacement Oracle database for SDWIS will be available for states to populate on October 1, 2004, that the goal is for all states to use the modern data flow by December 2004, and that the Safe Drinking Water Information System/Federal-Version (SDWIS/Fed) will be turned off on September 30, 2005.
  
  
• Abe Siegel presented and discussed: a) the Central Data Exchange (CDX) that states and regions can now use to securely flow their quarterly files to SDWIS, b) the Extensible Markup Language (XML) schema that will be the new format for those quarterly files, and c) the Federal Reporting (Fed Rep) validation software which will reside on the state and regional desktops and perform 70% of file validations before getting to Headquarters.
  
  
• Laurie Cullerot of New Hampshire presented and discussed the e-Drinking Water Reporting (e-DWR) drinking water XML schema that is flexible enough to use for several environmental media data flows and detailed enough to electronically flow drinking water rule-required data from labs to Public Water Systems (PWSs) to states.
  
  
• Barrett Brown of North Dakota and Luann Darnell of EPA Headquarters demonstrated draft desktop Significant Non-Compliance (SNC) calculators that generated a lot of interest by the states and regions.
  
  
• Lee Kyle of Headquarters had a discussion with the group about data warehouses and provided an improvised demo of the pivot tables used for the ongoing Lead data effort.
  
  
• Pat Garvey gave a description and status report of the Exchange Network, including projections of how many states are expected to have version 1 nodes, as well as the number of states who will be receiving funds under the 2004 Network Readiness Grants to support drinking water data flows.

All of the presentations from the conference are available from the ASDWA web site at: http://www.asdwa.org/DataManagement/DMUC%202004/index.htm

The final business case analysis for development of a national UIC database was completed in April and sent to the OGWDW management and the regional UIC program managers for review. The business case analysis identified five key drivers toward data base development and proposed how a new UIC database could be integrated into ongoing Office of Water (OW) and agency-wide information technology initiatives. The analysis also proposed a minimum data element set that would respond to these business needs and a conceptual data system framework to illustrate how the data would flow from the states through the CDX into a new UIC data repository. The business case analysis is being presented on May 19, 2004 at the EPA UIC program managers meeting in New York City and will be the subject of a number of meetings in the OW, the Office of Environmental Information (OEI) and the Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance (OECA) over the next few weeks to seek support for moving forward with the database planning initiative.

The 2004 SDWIS/STATE Users Group Meeting was a tremendous success. Approximately 84 people were in attendance representing 33 states, seven EPA regional offices, three contractors, and one laboratory. The main focus of the meeting was the presentation by EPA's contractor, Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), which introduced the web-enabled release of SDWIS/STATE. This new generation of SDWIS/STATE (as Project Manager Ed Cottrill has called it) met with a great deal of enthusiasm from the audience and sometimes led to lively discussions. While many of those in the SDWIS/STATE user community participated in its design, this was their first glimpse of the look and feel of their new data system. A beta version should be available this December and the productions release is scheduled for early
summer 2005.

Additionally at the meeting, there were several presentations by contractors, states, and a laboratory addressing a variety of topics. Among them were demonstrations of how they currently use SDWIS/STATE to meet their business needs, a discussion on how the SDWIS modernization will affect their business practices, and what SDWIS/STATE users need to do to prepare for the web enabled version of the software.

It should be noted that the Data Sharing Committee and the SDWIS/STATE Users Group Meeting were scheduled concurrently which forced attendees to choose between those two important meetings. The Data Sharing Committee is a recommending body whose meeting provides a forum to discuss critical issues which affect virtually all drinking water primacy agencies. EPA and ASDWA will be looking into this problem and will make whatever adjustments need to be made to give everyone the opportunity to participate in the events of their choosing.

Finally, our thanks to all of you who attended and also to those who gave presentations. We have made arrangements with ASDWA to post the Power Point files for those presentations on their website, http://www.asdwa.org. They will be added to their website just as soon as ASDWA receives them from the presenters. But the presentations are just slides and do not include the fine narrative of the presenters nor their response to questions from the audience. In addition to the terrific presentations there were very lively discussions which could never be captured electronically. Hopefully, your 2005 budget will allow more people from your organizations to attend these important events.