Polluters, extractors, power-plant owners, corporate farmers, and land developers have good reason to be happy with the Trump regime. Since arriving in office three years ago, Donald Trump has rolled back 95 environmental rules. Or tried to. Many of these remain in litigation. Just a week ago, the White House announced that it would roll back protection for half the nation’s wetlands, which will spark more lawsuits. But even if some of those rollbacks are reversed, the wreckage is obvious, from the Obama-era Clean Power Plan to elimination of a Carter-era policy protecting migratory birds. If Trump could, he’d probably erase Richard Nixon’s 50-year-old signature on the National Environmental Policy Act.
Now, Christopher Flavelle at The New York Times reports that the Environmental Protection Agency is allowing cities to keep dumping raw sewage into waterways by approving delays in fixing their antiquated sewage systems, some of which date to the late 1800s. The problem is most acute for older cities in the Northeast and Midwest that use systems that combine sewage and rainwater run-off during storms. Normally, the two flow into a treatment plant. But an intense storm can swamp the system, and that means the sewage winds up tainting surface water. Climate change is already intensifying storms, and scientists tell us this is going to worsen over time.
In the neighborhood of 700 U.S. cities still dump toilet waste into lakes, rivers, and the ocean. A quarter-century ago, under the Clean Water Act, the EPA took legal action against 200 large and medium-sized cities to require them to upgrade their sewage systems, which can be exceedingly expensive. The agency negotiated agreements with the cities on the nature of the upgrades with firm deadlines. which are enforced under court-ordered consent decrees.
Such agreements have in the past been renegotiated or modified somewhat, but only under special circumstances. During the eight years of the Obama administration, there were 17 of these. Under Trump, 12 in three years. The head of an association of water utilities told the Times that he believes about half the existing agreements are in the process of being renegotiated.
The key complaint: cities can’t afford to comply with some of the agreements, or at least not on the mandated timetables. In Washington, D.C., three huge, miles-long tunnels and related infrastructure are being drilled to handle any future overflows. Estimated price: $2.7 billion, being paid for by utility customers, which critics point out burdens people of low income. St. Louis has been upgrading its sewage system to include a half-mile tunnel. But other cities are resisting.
While officials in many of these cities praise the Trump administration’s flexibility, environmentalists say that the changes threaten safety by allowing pathogens and chemicals to keep flowing into rivers and along beaches and to back up into streets or basements during storms.
“This trend is yet another example of the administration’s deregulatory agenda threatening our natural resources and public health,” said Becky Hammer, deputy director for federal water policy at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “If cities face genuine cost concerns, there are other methods to maintain affordability while still keeping sewage out of our lakes and rivers.”
Some local officials also complain that the upgrades aren’t worth it in places where there have already been improvements vastly reducing the amount of sewage being dumped. Flavelle reports that Mishawaka, Indiana, for instance, dumped 300 million gallons a year of raw sewage into the St. Joseph River in the 1990s and dumps about 4.2 million gallons a year now. The city’s municipal waste manager said removing those remaining millions of gallons will produce “no measurable improvement in water quality in the river.” The city wants to renegotiate its agreement to get rid of the requirement to build an overflow tunnel.
These projects can indeed pinch local budgets. Many cities are still suffering the after-effects of the Great Recession when their revenues plummeted and hundreds of thousands of public employees were laid off. In many cities, a lot of those jobs have still not been filled.
A decade ago in Los Angeles, then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa proposed a “10/30” program to finance a more rapid expansion of the city’s light rail and subway system, which by then had been under construction for 35 years. Under Measure R, passed by the voters in 2008, the city would spend up to $13.7 billion to complete rail projects, paid for with a half-cent sales tax. The hangup? The tax would only bring in that amount over 30 years, with about $3 billion of it in the first 10 years. Too long, said Villaraigosa and public transportation advocates. So the mayor came up with a solution. Have the federal government lend the city the money it needed to build the new projects in a decade, to be paid off as the Measure R money trickled in over the next three decades. That smart plan was given high fives in some quarters in Washington, but soon given up for a new federal transportation bonding proposal.
A nationwide 10/30 move for sewage upgrades could ease the economic squeeze on cities mandated to make these changes by spreading the costs over a longer period. There are, indeed, many infrastructure projects that would benefit from a 10/30 approach.