Commentary: Safe drinking water is essential to life and a human right. Let’s fund it.

Safe drinking water is essential to the survival of human beings and is a fundamental human right enshrined in California law. Yet 1 million Californians lack access to clean and affordable drinking water each year.

That is why the American Heart Association has joined a broad coalition of more than 110 health, environmental justice, labor, business and agricultural groups to solve this public health crisis.

Related: Why a tax on drinking water is wrong

Ensuring safe and affordable drinking water for children and families is a basic need that must be met in order to safeguard the health of our communities. To improve cardiovascular health, a key priority for the American Heart Association is to encourage populations to replace their sugar-sweetened beverage consumption with healthier beverage choices like water. Creating a system that provides safe and affordable water is an important strategy to increase consumption of water and decrease consumption of unhealthy sugary drinks.

The California State Water Resources Control Board (SWRCB) has found that hundreds of communities are unable to consistently provide safe drinking water, some for a decade or longer. These communities are found across California, including in Southern California such as the Imperial Valley and, yes, even in San Diego County. How can we advocate and encourage families to choose water over sugary beverages when they lack the basic access to a clean and affordable water source?

High treatment costs put clean drinking water out of reach for many disadvantaged communities, especially those with small and lower income ratepayer bases. Many residents of these communities are forced to pay both a water bill for unsafe drinking water and for bottled water.

In other cases, high drinking water treatment costs result in unaffordable and burdensome water rates for residents of disadvantaged communities. Even more troubling, the SWRCB data does not include the nearly 2 million Californians not served by a public water system, whose wells have few regulatory requirements and are not eligible for most assistance programs, leaving them particularly vulnerable to unsafe drinking water.

The greatest barrier preventing communities from providing safe drinking water is the lack of a continuous funding source to support ongoing operations and maintenance costs for drinking water treatment. Other existing funding sources cannot provide the 20-30 year certainty in operational funds that small communities need to then secure long-term grant and loan funding, leaving them without ability to afford safe drinking water. This is why the SWRCB has for years called for the creation of a sustainable funding source to support safe and affordable drinking water needs.

The Safe and Affordable Drinking Water Fund, first established as Senate Bill 623 by Sen. Bill Monning, D-Carmel, and now included in a budget trailer bill as part of Gov. Jerry Brown’s 2018 budget proposal, would provide an ongoing source of funding to ensure all Californians have access to clean drinking water, including those in our most disadvantaged and underserved communities. This is historic and long overdue.

Providing safe and affordable drinking water for all of our citizens is a step in the right direction that will help mitigate one of the most basic needs to live a healthy, productive life. We can’t let this opportunity slip away or let one more year pass while our children and families continue to languish without access to this basic human right.

Sanchez-Mata is a family physician in San Diego who serves on the board of the San Diego American Heart Association.