Hidden agenda 

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AMSA is currently pushing the EPA to release AMSA members from liability for most sewer spills, and thus the potential fine of $25,000 or more per spill.

"They got upset about the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972," says a prominent environmentalist who asked not to be named because he often interacts with AMSA representatives on water issues. "The thing about AMSA is that with the big sewage boys they represent, like Charlotte-Mecklenburg, there's a continuum of intention and operational history from pretty good and progressive to pretty bad. AMSA tends to sink to the lowest common denominator. They play a very typical lobbying game. Instead of believing they can change the reality on the ground and help to create a better world, sometimes what they try to do is get theirs. They come at it often from an engineering perspective. They say, "We don't have a public health mandate, we don't really have a clean water mandate, our mandate is to meet the federal and state guidelines and we've got constraints and those constraints are real and you don't understand what it's like to operate on the ground in the way we do with the lack of political support for rate increases.'"

AMSA representatives put a more positive spin on their mission.

"The idea is to develop a system where publicly owned treatment works will be protected when overflows are unavoidable, so as to avoid an enforcement penalty that would be unfair," said Adam Krantz, AMSA's government affairs manager. "In other words, if you put these programs in place and you're doing your best to avoid overflows, those overflows that then occur should not be enforceable." In other words, if treatment facilities are following pre-specified management, operation and maintenance plans, they should bear no responsibility if raw sewage spills occur.

Although Krantz wouldn't give CL a written list of what AMSA considered to be "unavoidable" overflows, he said that such a list would include sewage spills due to wet weather conditions, dry weather conditions, infiltration and inflow, population growth, aging systems, system expansion and tree roots and grease blockage. In other words, just about every conceivable cause of sewer spills. While some number of sewage spills are unavoidable in any system, environmentalists say that if AMSA's "exceptions" were adopted by the EPA, utilities like CMU would no longer be legally responsible for the damage caused by the vast majority of raw sewage spills that occur, including those like the nearly five million gallon spill off Johnston Road this summer, which spewed from a manhole in an aging, overburdened section of CMU's sewage system into a creek and neighborhood yards where children play.

Because updating old or overburdened infrastructure is often at the bottom of local governments' priority list, say environmentalists, considering aging systems or population growth as unavoidable sewage spill factors would discourage cities from upgrading old or overburdened systems that regularly cause health risks and environmental damage -- particularly if government leaders knew they couldn't be held responsible for the sewage spills that resulted.

"What AMSA would argue is that since hurricanes happen, obviously it is impossible for us to keep sewage in the sewage pipes 100 percent of the time," said Sarah Meyland, Executive Director of Citizens Campaign for the Environment, a New York environmental group. "No one would argue with that statement, but they then would want to take that very narrow exception and expand it into a very broad-reaching general waiver of liability. This was one of the central battlegrounds in the debate within the federal process."

When asked about exceptions to the sewer overflow rule, CMU took a more moderate position than the one AMSA is advocating on its behalf.

"Our position has ALWAYS been that ANY overflow is unacceptable and our goal is zero," CMU's Simpson said in an email to CL. "However we believe there will always be some overflows caused by circumstances that are beyond the control of this utility (extreme weather events or controlling everything deposited down every drain, for example). Those circumstances make zero spills a virtually impossible goal and it would be reasonable for any rules or enforcement system -- current or proposed -- to consider those circumstances."

The question, say critics of AMSA's approach, is where will the list of exceptions to sewage overflows end? Decreasing liability for utilities is something AMSA has been working toward for a long time, said Meyland.

"AMSA has really been an effective force in creating a perception within EPA headquarters that is leaning toward giving them (utilities) more and more so-called flexibility and basically legal protection for allowing sewage to get back into the environment through overflows and breaks in the pipes and all these other situations." Looking For A Blank CheckAMSA representatives routinely tell the media that the "zero tolerance" rule the EPA is currently considering for sewage spills would put an undue financial burden on waste water treatment systems across the country, costing taxpayers millions to comply with strict federal regulations.