Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
No. 138
Thursday, July 18, 2002 Page A-7
ISSN 1521-9402
News
Water Pollution
Activist Says Municipalities Seeking Regulatory Relief Rather Than Solutions
PORTLAND, Ore.--Municipalities are expending too much effort trying to get
regulatory relief and finding loopholes in Clean Water Act regulations and not
enough time on finding solutions to emerging problems facing the wastewater
treatment industry, an environmental activist told a meeting of municipal
officials July 17.
However, the wastewater treatment officials took issue with her position, saying
they are working to meet water quality obligations in the face of rising costs
and crumbling infrastructure.
The panel discussion took place at the summer meeting of the Association of
Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies.
Nina Bell, executive director the Northwest Environmental Advocates, said AMSA's
opposition to several provisions in an upcoming Environmental Protection Agency
rule to regulate sanitary sewer overflows represents a step backward from the
goals of the Clean Water Act.
Specifically, she targeted municipal efforts to get EPA to drop provisions
calling for an absolute prohibition on overflows.
EPA signed a proposal in January 2001 to regulate SSOs, but it was pulled back
for review before it got published. The agency has said it plans to repropose
the rule with substantially the same regulatory language but with changes to the
preamble reflecting comments received so far on the rulemaking.
Draft Proposal Headed for OMB
Kevin Weiss, the SSO program manager in the EPA Office of Wastewater Management,
said the agency planned to send the draft proposal to the White House Office of
Management and Budget for review in October with the expectation that it would
be published for comment in early 2003.
Bell said municipalities need to take the "moral high ground" as much on dealing
with wastewater as they do in pushing to ensure they have adequate clean
drinking water.
"That's the only place to be if you want to make progress in demanding that
agriculture curtail its pollution for, among other reasons, to protect urban
drinking water," she said. "The more municipalities seek to get off the
regulatory hook, the more farmers will exploit the situation."
Moreover, while municipalities are pushing for regulatory relief, she said, new
problems are emerging, such as new contaminants and hormones disrupting
chemicals, that demand leadership.
Wastewater treatment officials expressed concern about several provisions of the
January 2001 SSO proposal. For one thing, they said sewer overflows during storm
events are unavoidable regardless of how well the treatment system operates. The
EPA proposal attempts to address that by providing criteria for an "affirmative
defense" for facilities that have approved capacity, management, operation, and
maintenance (CMOM) plans.
Infrastructure Issues
While Bell said it did not take "rocket science" to keep "sewage in the pipes
and rainwater out of the pipes," AMSA members said the cost of meeting the
"lofty goals" of environmental activists is prohibitively expensive.
Finding solutions and funding for the problem of aging infrastructure requires
political will that Bell said AMSA lacks.
"AMSA's will has been directed recently at turning tail and running," she said.
Rather, municipalities should try to address their infrastructure problems in a
smarter way. For example, they should employ strategies that promote ways "to
retain water where it falls rather than turning it into that pollution source
called storm water," she said.
Chris Westhoff, assistant city attorney for the Los Angeles Department of Public
Works, told BNA many efforts to improve the use of water resources are rebuffed
by a public skeptical of water reclamation projects.
These include the use of waste water effluent that has been treated to the
statutorily required secondary standard for other purposes such as irrigation or
industrial cooling. When talk extends to allowing this reclaimed water to seep
into underground aquifers where it may be withdrawn in later years and treated
further to be used as drinking water, public acceptance ends, he said.
"It's the yuck factor," Westhoff said.
Lisa Hollander, assistant general counsel for the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer
District, said the only way to get improvements in water quality is for EPA to
issue a "realistic rule" that can be implemented. An absolute prohibition on
SSOs is not realistic, she said.
Moreover, the Clean Water Act does not specifically prohibit overflows, she
said. It only bans discharges that do not have a permit.
On the issue of CMOMs, Hollander said the management, operation, and maintenance
(MOM) portion of the concept differs substantially from the capacity issue. The
MOM issue deals with day-to-day management of the facility while capacity is
long-term planning issue involving significant capital investment. MOM involves
how well a facility is managed in dry weather while capacity becomes a wet
weather concern.
Satellite Collection Systems
Another contentious issue in the SSO debate is how to address satellite
collection systems. These may be sewer systems in one jurisdiction that collect
waste water and transport it for treatment at a plant operated by another
jurisdiction. AMSA officials want these collection systems to be permitted
separately because the treatment facility has no control over entities outside
their jurisdiction and do not want the liability.
Bell said collection systems "have proven to be a weak link" in the sewerage
system. She questioned who would be responsible for overflows from these
collection systems, especially if there is no blanket prohibition on SSOs.
Hollander said an informal AMSA survey that generated responses from 49
utilities indicated the presence of 770 satellite systems.
"The vast majority of systems in the country are satellite collection systems,"
she said. "So bringing them into the rule is critical. But there must be a
recognition of the existing legal relationships."
By Susan Bruninga