Clean Water Advocacy - Newsroom - AMSA in the News
EPA sewage proposal nearly complete, official says
Greenwire
10/29/2002
Damon Franz, Greenwire staff writer
A long-stalled regulation aimed at limiting the amount of raw sewage discharged
from sewer pipes into America's waterways is in the final stages of analysis and
will be released to the White House Office of Management and Budget for approval
in the next two weeks, a U.S. EPA official said last week.
At a water quality conference sponsored by the American Law Institute and
American Bar Association, EPA Deputy Assistant Administrator for Water Benjamin
Grumbles said EPA is entering the final agency review of the new sanitary sewage
overflow (SSO) rule. In the final review, the EPA offices charged with
implementing the rule will reach consensus on its provisions before sending it
to OMB.
The SSO rule, developed during the Clinton administration, seeks to address a
problem that has been hampering progress on water quality since the enactment of
the the Clean Water Act 30 years ago -- the discharge of untreated human waste
from sewer pipes into rivers, streams and estuaries. EPA estimates that such
waste emissions -- the result of overflows, leaks, blockages and mechanical
failures -- occur 40,000 times in the United States every year, and one
environmentalist pegged the total annual discharge at 1 trillion gallons.
Although those overflows are all illegal under CWA, EPA has been slow to act on
the problem because of the cost to local communities of bringing the discharges
under control. And while the agency has recently brought legal action against
some large cities for raw sewage discharges, the majority occur without
penalties or fines.
To bring discharges from sanitary sewers -- which differ from combined sewers in
that they carry only human waste and not stormwater -- under CWA control, the
Clinton-era proposal required all municipalities that operate such sewer
collection systems to get a point-source pollution permit under the National
Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. The rule would prohibit unpermitted
discharges and require public notification and reporting of overflow events.
In addition, the rule would require all municipalities with sanitary sewers to
develop a plan for managing their overflows. The capacity management, operation
and maintenance (MOM) program would set up guidelines for operating and
maintaining the sewer system, ensure all sanitary sewer systems have enough
capacity to handle waste even during peak flows in wet weather, require all
possible steps are taken to mitigate the overflows and provide guidelines for
notifying the public.
The Clinton EPA released the rule in draft form on Jan. 4, 2001, but the Bush
administration suspended it for further review as part of the Card memorandum on
the day President Bush took office. Nearly a year later, EPA Assistant
Administrator for Water Tracey Mehan announced the agency would move forward
with a new rule that keeps the same regulatory language as the Clinton-era rule
but revises the preamble to solicit stakeholder suggestions on alternatives to
the zero-discharge policy.
According to Nancy Stoner of the Natural Resources Defense Council, CWA does not
give the EPA much wiggle room in revising the regulation. "They're confined in
what they can do by the Clean Water Act, which specifically requires secondary
treatment for all sewage discharges," she said. "The can permit discharges, but
they have to provide effective treatment."
The Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies, however, opposes the
provision of the Clinton rule that prohibits all untreated discharges, claiming
it would be too expensive and is not a realistic goal. Instead, the group feels
the management, operation and maintenance programs will be sufficient to stem
the overflow problem.
"AMSA continues to oppose the imposition of a zero discharge standard for SSOs,"
AMSA President Ken Kirk said in a letter to Mehan dated Aug. 20. "The agency
itself acknowledges that a zero discharge standard is unachievable even in the
best-run systems. AMSA recommends instead that the agency consider proposing a
standard for SSO reduction based on the implementation of MOM programs and
capacity assurance plans."
NRDC claims that AMSA previously agreed to the zero-discharge policy when it
participated in a federal advisory committee to form the rule. Implementing the
Clinton-era rule as it was originally drafted, NRDC says, would cost Americans
only $1.92 per household every year.
According to EPA statistics, the rule would cost municipalities between $93.5
million and $126.5 million annually.
In addition to modifying the preamble language, EPA is also making some changes
to the rule's cost-benefit analysis, according to AMSA spokesman Adam Krantz.
"They have to prove to OMB that the costs of the rule will not outweigh the
benefits," he said. "They need to make sure that municipalities are not hit with
these tremendous costs at a time when their budgets are being cut, for little
environmental gain."