Environmental perfection will be the death of the Middle Class.

If you doubt that, take a look at your city utility bill. A large chunk of what you’re paying for sewer and water is the direct result of state and federal overkill with environmental regulations.

Manteca’s treated wastewater for years exceeded state quality standards. The water the city returned to the San Joaquin River was - and still is - substantially cleaner than what floats by on any given day. The city hired a chemist over 10 years ago to prove it.

But the state wasn’t interested. They had switched test fish for ammonia content in treated wastewater from a native species found in the Delta to minnow fingerlings that are super sensitive to ammonia. The result is Manteca - and a host of other nearby cities - failed the tests. The result was at least a $20 million tab to upgrade the wastewater treatment plant or about a third of the bill for the retrofit and expansion project.

Now the state is dickering with regulations that may mandate lower salt content in treated wastewater. Reducing salt even further is expected to balloon treatment costs.

The new federal standard for arsenic handed down for drinking water has forced Manteca to spend in excess of $14 million to upgrade its system. Forget the fact the city didn’t exceed previously established levels for arsenic. Ignore the fact that none of the wells being retrofitted or blended with surface water had a high enough arsenic content to pose a health risk to the portion of the population most susceptible to arsenic. The new mandated federal standard is significantly lower in terms of arsenic allowed than the universally accepted health standard.

Typical of how extreme the environmental perfection movement is going can be found in New York City. The Environmental Protection Agency has mandated the Big Apple to build a $1.6 billion cover on a 90-acre reservoir to prevent contamination by a water-borne pathogen known as cryptosporidium. The pathogen causes diarrhea.

Sounds like a reasonable mandate until you examine the facts. First, the pathogen has never been found in the reservoir even though there are years upon years of testing data. New York’s health services confirmed there are just about 100 cases of diarrhea each year in a city of 8.1 million people attributed to the pathogen.

The EPA claims the $1.6 billion cover will prevent somewhere between 112,000 and 365,000 cases of diarrhea caused each year by the pathogen. That’s a lot of expensive hype given there are only 100 confirmed cases each year in the entire city.

New York City water rates are up 91 percent since 2006 due to unfunded EPA mandates that have marginally improved water quality.

It is an inconvenient truth that this nation’s urban drinking water today is significantly cleaner than it was 20 years ago. And it is light years cleaner than in the “good old days” when man did nothing to treat water.

The same goes for our wastewater.

Yet the EPA and other bureaucrats driven by what can only be a desire to protect their jobs by creating new “scares” keep striving for environmental perfection through mandates.

It will get to the point where environmental perfection will break our backs financially unless lawmakers reign in overzealous regulators who answer to no one but the gods of the state and federal bureaucracies.