Rutland Herald
By Lola Duffort
STAFF WRITER | March 17,2016
STAFF WRITER | March 17,2016
The Vermont Agency of Natural Resources is updating its rules to meet the standards of the federal Clean Water Act, and including language that could in certain circumstances prohibit new hookups to combined sewer and storm water treatment systems. Heavy rainfall can overwhelm combined systems, and municipalities will often turn to dumping sewage into nearby waterways to keep it from flooding streets and properties.
But for Rutland City Public Works Commissioner Jeffrey Wennberg, the proposed ANR rules establish “an expectation for compliance that can’t be complied with” and “a punishment that essentially shuts down the entire region.”
Rutland City is one of 16 municipalities in the state that operates such a combined system, although that does not include those towns piping into those systems. In the Rutland area, for example, parts of Killington, Mendon, Rutland Town and Clarendon are connected to the city’s system. Several of those towns are considering or have already signed on to resolutions in opposition to the new rules.
Draft language for the new rules include the following passage:
“If there are documented, recurrent instances of sewage backups or discharges of raw sewage onto the ground surface, the municipality shall, upon receipt of written notification from the Agency, prohibit further connections within the service area of the backup that would increase the frequency or volume of the surcharges/backups.”
While the new rules don’t explicitly say that combined systems must decouple and treat storm water and sewage separately or else end all new inputs into the system, Wennberg argues that’s how he interprets the end result.
“The main thing is, the other sections in the proposed rule imply — they don’t actually say it … It implies that the only way to successfully comply is to separate 100 percent of combined sewers,” he said.
According to his estimates, the cost of such a project in Rutland City would be in the environs of $125 to $150 million dollars.
The city simply can’t raise that much money, Wennberg said.
“The notion that they could prohibit Mrs. Jones on South Street from adding a bathroom to her house because the city of Rutland doesn’t have $150 million to solve their problem is ludicrous. And this is the basis of our concern,” he said.
Aside from the fact that the project is a financial non-starter for the city, it wouldn’t necessarily help water quality either, he argued. Because combined systems subject storm water to much more thorough treatment than systems that treat sewage and storm water separately, water quality is often better served in a combined system, he said.
“The benefits, from the standpoint of protecting water quality, of having all of that storm water run through a very large treatment plant, far, far, far outweigh the environmental harm or risk associated with occasional and relatively brief overflows during heavy rain,” he said.
Also, Wennberg said, the city resents new mandates coming down from the state at the very same time that state aid to mitigate overflow projects is being slashed.
Rutland recently completed a $5.2 million project to separate the sewer and storm water system across 50 acres in its northwest neighborhood.
The city qualified to have 25 percent of the project covered by a state CSO grant program, Wennberg said, but when the agency put CSO grants to Rutland and St. Johnsbury into the budget last year, they were cut by the governor’s office. After pleading with legislators, the city recouped $78,000 — a far cry from the $1.3 million it expected to receive.
“On the one hand, the agency is proposing draconian and completely unworkable costs and prohibitions on communities like Rutland, and on the other hand the governor and the Legislature are refusing to fund even those programs that they’ve had in place since 1993,” Wennberg said. “They’re ripping the money away to support this at the same time as they’re doubling down on the requirements.”
Also, Wennberg noted that a new bill under consideration this session, H.610, essentially cuts the program altogether.
But Julia Butzler, an environmental analyst with the agency’s Department of Environmental Conservation said the state is no way interested in a blanket moratorium on development in municipalities still connected to combined systems.
The agency doesn’t expect municipalities to completely solve the problem before new hookups are considered — but they need to make sure the situation is getting better and not worse.
“We want to work the municipalities as much as possible. That said, we do not feel that we can permit that municipalities are allowed to make the situation… the volume, the frequency, or the duration of (combined sewer overflow) events worse. And that is where that language has come from,” she said, noting that the language could be revised further.
And while separating out systems entirely might be the best option for some towns, she said, it might not for others. She couldn’t say what Rutland would need to do to meet standards.
“We understand that CSOs are a site-specific problem. So every single outfall is going to have its own set of characteristics and challenges and costs associated with it … And so we have tried to craft the rules to allow for a lot of flexibility for the municipality and how they approach CSO abatement,” Butzler said. Other mitigating projects could include expanding the capacity of treatment plants — which Rutland has done — or installing catch basins.
Butzler said she wouldn’t dispute Wennberg’s estimates about the cost of separating out sewage and storm water in the system. Such projects are “outrageously expensive” and a “challenge logistically.”
“However, we are required, we are bound by the Clean Water Act to meet the water quality standards put forth, which requires that these CSOs are abated,” she said.
She said Wennberg’s argument that water quality could significantly be lessened by a separated system was “debatable,” and it ignored the public health aspect.
“The pollutant load in storm water is not as significant as the public health risk factor that the combined sewer creates (when there is an overflow),” she said.
The date for public comment on the new rule closes March 31. More information is available at https://secure.vermont.gov/SOS/rules/display.php?r=364
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