The battle for water quality on Cape Cod seems to finally be reaching its inflection point.

On March 21, the Patrick administration, the State Treasurer’s Office, and the Cape Cod Commission (CCC), the Cape’s land use overseer, signed a memorandum of understanding to allocate $3.35 million to CCC to develop a cost-effective and environmentally-sound approach to managing Cape Cod’s water quality, seriously affected by nitrogen contamination. $3 million will go toward developing a plan to prioritize water resources, identifying the most impaired or endangered, and what local action is needed to achieve water quality goals as quickly as possible.

An additional $350,000 will be used to build a Cape Cod Wastewater “SmartMap” and cost model, linking land-use data with newly developed scientific and financial planning data to help cape communities identify environmentally appropriate and affordable wastewater infrastructure solutions.

The issue of water quality is as much an environmental issue as an economic development one. Surging residential development on the Cape, paired with federal cutbacks during the Regan administration, have allowed the problem to fester. But the fact that multiple agencies are working to resolve the problem illustrates the seriousness of the issue.

To put it all in perspective, groundwater provides drinking water for more than one-half of the nation’s population, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, and is the sole source of drinking water for many rural communities and some large cities. In 1990, groundwater accounted for 39 percent of water withdrawn for public supply for cities and towns and 96 percent of water withdrawn by self-supplied systems for domestic use.

One option for fixing the problem is creating a sewer mandate, but that could be extremely costly. Another option would be to require sources of nitrogen on the Cape to have Clean Water Act permits. But whatever the plan, the March 21 agreement is a first step towards a solution. Let’s hope it’s more than a Band-Aid.