Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
WaterWorld March, 2005
AMSA Develops Action Plan for Overflow Control
The Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA) has sent an Action Plan
to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recommending steps EPA should take
to help ensure continued progress in the control of combined and sanitary sewer
overflow controls (CSOs and SSOs).
The Action Plan comes in response to EPA’s August 2004 Report to Congress on the
Impacts and Controls of CSOs and SSOs, and highlights key facts from the report
while recommending next steps to further control CSOs and SSOs.
Ken Kirk, Executive Director of AMSA, said EPA’s 2004 report demonstrates that
“clean water facilities have done an outstanding job in reducing sewer
overflows.”
“It is imperative that EPA develop a flexible SSO policy that incorporates
watershed planning principles and allows communities to direct resources to
those areas that will best improve public health and the environment,” Kirk
said.
According to the EPA report, $6 billion had been spent by municipalities as of
2002 to control CSOs. As a result, the annual CSO volume is approximately 850
billion gallons, down from over 1 trillion gallons prior to the implementation
of EPA’s CSO Control Policy. At the same time, the number of CSO events has
dropped from approximately 60,000, to around 43,000, or a reduction of 28
percent.
EPA estimated that the annual volume of SSOs is between 3 and 10 billion gallons
- two orders of magnitude smaller than the 311 billion gallons per year figure
it had estimated when developing the draft SSO Rule. EPA estimates an estimated
$88 billion and $50.6 billion is needed over the next 20 years to control SSOs
and CSOs, respectively.
CSO Policy
According to AMSA, the key to continued progress in further limiting CSOs lies
in the development and approval of long-term control plans (LTCP) for every CSO
community to achieve compliance with water quality standards. AMSA believes
National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System (NPDES) permits, not enforcement
or consent orders, should be the primary tool for imposing these LTCP
obligations.
“A major impediment to meeting the goals of the CSO Control Policy (i.e.,
compliance with water quality standards), is that the existing standards are not
based on the actual uses of CSO-impacted waterbodies,” AMSA wrote in it’s action
plan. “The impact of this disconnect is the development of LTCPs that can never
achieve full compliance with all water quality standards under all operating
conditions.”
The CSO Control Policy recommends that use-attainability analyses be used to
determine the appropriate use for a particular receiving water, but this step in
the LTCP process is poorly defined and rarely successful, AMSA said. As a
result, CSO communities are unable to develop LTCPs that regulatory agencies
consider approvable.
To remedy these problems, AMSA believes that EPA and the states must be
authorized to provide CSO communities with site-specific criteria that will be
used to evaluate their LTCPs. These criteria must be established based on
appropriate uses for the receiving water and must contain achievable goals based
on the goals of the CSO Policy.
EPA, water quality standards authorities, and CSO communities should work
together to ensure that water quality standards are reviewed and revised as
appropriate to reflect the actual uses of CSO-impacted waterbodies.
“In the absence of this approach, what will likely dominate the horizon is the
uneven application of standards, expensive and unnecessary construction, and
resource-wasting enforcement actions,” AMSA said.
SSO Policy
AMSA believes a national policy on SSOs must be developed. Without a regulatory
policy and/or program on SSOs, EPA’s current enforcement policies are forcing
many communities to commit tremendous resources in a fruitless attempt to
eliminate all SSOs, AMSA said.
AMSA recommends the development of a national SSO policy modeled after the CSO
Control Policy. The CSO Control Policy acknowledges that a zero tolerance policy
for CSOs is not appropriate. AMSA believes that the same approach should apply
to SSOs. AMSA recommends the following:
• Develop a national SSO policy that enables the use of holistic,
watershed-based approaches that will ensure that available resources can be used
to provide controls for the wet weather overflow problem - whether CSO, SSO,
and/or stormwater - that is having the greatest impact, thus maximizing
environmental and public health benefit;
• Establish a national municipal collection system permitting program, which
will include satellite collection systems, using the management, operation, and
maintenance (MOM) concept as the standard for measuring compliance, and
including a capacity assurance standard; and
• Conduct any additional scientific studies necessary on the issue of
environmental or public health impacts to ensure sound regulatory and
enforcement policy (e.g., more work is needed to further define the relative
impacts of urban stormwater runoff and overflows and to discern between human
and nonhuman sources of pathogens).
AMSA is working on a model SSO policy that will contain the specific language
that municipalities believe is critical for a workable SSO program. AMSA plans
to share this proposal with EPA and Congress when it is completed in early 2005.
AMSA will distribute its Action Plan to all members of Congress with the goal of
ensuring that wet weather policies remain a national priority. For additional
information on the Action Plan contact AMSA’s Director of Regulatory Affairs,
Chris Hornback at 202/833-2672 or
chornback@amsa-cleanwater.org.