Parents want to know why Forest Hill Elementary School keeps paying to filter potentially hazardous chemicals from well water when a county water main sits just down the road.

Since late 2006, the water at the school on Rocks Road has been filtered for methyl tertiary butyl ether, a gasoline additive now showing up in groundwater around the state.

The filters have kept the MTBE out of the water for drinking and washing. But about 100 parents turned out Monday, demanding officials tell them why the school has spent $60,000 so far on filtration and may have to continue replacing filters indefinitely at $4,700 per change. Public water lines stop at Jarrettsville Road, just south of the school’s property line.

“Why are we fooling around with our children and our safety? Help relieve us parents, and our minds,” said Theresa Miranda, mother of a fifth-grader at Forest Hill. “What’s the cost of public water?”

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“For $60,000, you couldn’t run 100 feet of water line, and it’s much more than that to get water up to here,” said County Councilman “Captain Jim” McMahan.

The school lies just outside the “development envelope,” the area around Bel Air and Route 40 where the county has promised to keep all of its public utilities and heaviest development. Extending the water line outside that envelope could open the area to more development, McMahan said.

The Maryland Department of the Environment has narrowed potential MTBE sources to an underground heating-oil tank used by the school and a former gas station on Jarrettsville Road, said Herbert Meade of the MDE’s Oil Control division. Unless the source can be pinpointed, the filtration system could be required for more than 10 years, he said.

Faced with parents worried about cancer and demanding to know the long-term health effects of MTBE, Meade lamented that the government has not done enough study to know for sure. To be safe, he said, MDE requires filtration at any level of contamination greater than 20 parts per billion, though Forest Hill’s prefilter water peaked as high as 302 parts per billion last November.

School board President Tom Fidler said he and the County Council could work on legislation to restrict who could use public water if it were extended, so the school could be connected without opening the area to more development.

Councilman Chad Shrodes, whose district includes the school, said he was willing to be part of that dialogue. Such promises, however, drew skepticism.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com