Good Day,
My name is Joseph Ghodsee and I am Commissioner 2 for East Spokane Water District 1 and I need your help.
Our Aquifer is unconfined and extreamly susceptible to pollutants because we don’t have a nonporous layer of stone protecting it. This means that pollutants such as PFAS, PFOS, and any other forever chemical puts us at extreme risk of no longer having safe and clean drinking water. My district had a problem last year where we were sitting at over 4 times the legal limit at 16 PPT with PFOS contamination putting all of us, especially our children, at risk. It’s also not just my district, over 1,200 Washington water sources have been contaminated as well with a chemical we have known to have no safe amount for human consumption since the 70s.
Yet we cannot just ban PFOS to stop this issue, because chemicals are considered innocent until proven guilty under the law as it stands, and to prove danger requires years of studies proving the chemical unsafe before we can ban it. But we have done this before banning PFAS and that hasn’t stopped the threat of these long chain polymers. This is because they are effectively a chain of carbon atoms, with PFAS being 4 atoms long, and PFOS being 8 atoms long. Yet this distinction means that if we ban it now, they will release one that is 6 Atoms long, or 10 atoms long to continue poisoning us for profit.
This is why we need to get our laws in line and stop the importation and use of chemicals that have not been proven safe. Putting the burden of due care on the producer before poisoning the American people and not on the American people to prove it and ask them to stop.
It is for this reason I have drafted a resolution for the Washington Democratic Central Committee to immediately change the laws banning the importation and use of new chemicals which have not been proven safe. This means that all the existing chemicals will be grandfathered in and we will still be under threat by PFOS, but it gives us the opportunity so that once we prove PFOS unsafe we can immediately ban it without fear another worse chemical will come in to replace it.
Linked below is my resolution and I need your help to pass it. If you want to endorse this resolution I ask that you email me at
Please include your Name, official titles if you have them, and email.
Due Care for Products Imported and used in Washington:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1h6Om3LZTfkLxH\_t7QiYYDROU8zs4Q3cj4vudmmVsDxg/edit?usp=sharing