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Susana Barrios
From:Stephanie Mercadante <burglin.stephanie@gmail.com>
Sent:Tuesday, April 21, 2026 5:10 PM
To:Public Comment
Subject:\[EXTERNAL\] On Behalf of Marc Herbert
Warning: This email originated from outside the City of Anaheim. Do not click links or open
attachments unless you recognize the sender and are expecting the message.
For public comment on April 21, 2026:
Good evening, Mayor and Council Members,
I want to address an issue that is critical to public confidence: whether water sampling reflects normal
system conditions or ideal ones. The City continues to state that the water is safe, but those
assurances rely on compliance sampling. The strength of those results depends on one principle: that
samples represent the water residents receive every day, not conditions that are optimized
beforehand.
Right now, there is a growing gap between what residents are experiencing and what they are being
told. Residents are reporting strong chlorine odors, discoloration, and inconsistent water quality.
Whether those issues are temporary, localized, or systemic, they raise a fundamental question: do
compliance samples reflect what residents actually experience at their tap, or something different?
So tonight, I am requesting clarity on the City’s sampling protocols, specifically as they relate to
system flushing. Does the City conduct hydrant flushing before or after compliance sampling? If so,
under what conditions? And are those activities disclosed when results are presented to the public or
to this Council?
If operational activities like flushing occur immediately before sampling, it raises a reasonable
concern: are those samples capturing normal, day-to-day water quality, or temporarily improved
conditions? This is not an accusation; it is a request for transparency. If the system is operating
properly, then the sampling methodology should stand up to scrutiny and be clearly explained.
I would also ask whether the State Water Board has reviewed these practices, and whether they
consider them representative of typical system conditions if flushing occurs between tests.
At the end of the day, this comes down to trust. If sampling reflects ideal conditions instead of typical
conditions, then “safe” becomes a moving target. Residents are not asking for best-case scenarios.
They are asking for an accurate picture of what comes out of their tap every day. And when residents
turn to bottled water while being told everything is fine, that is not just perception; it is a breakdown in
public confidence.
So tonight, I am asking the City to close that gap with transparency, not just reassurance.
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