If you had to guess who was financing a national push to annihilate key parts of the Clean Water Act and allow raw sewage and industrial waste to be dumped into Mecklenburg County’s creeks and streams, you’d probably guess Big Business.
You’d be wrong. An investigation by Creative Loafing has revealed that much of the funding behind the federal battle to rip down parts of the 30-year-old law is coming from public wastewater treatment facilities like Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities.
As for who’s paying for it, well, that would be you, the public. Every time the residents of Charlotte-Mecklenburg pay their utility bills, they’re supporting a powerful special interest group which lobbies Congress and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to allow utilities to release more raw and partially treated human sewage into our creeks and streams without liability for any environmental or public health damage that could cause.
Over the last six years, Charlotte-Mecklenburg Utilities (CMU) has paid at least $60,000 in membership dues to the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA). The money came from the water and sewer rates and fees paid by CMU customers.
On its website, AMSA claims to promote clean water. What the website doesn’t mention is that it exclusively represents the interests of over 350 private and public sewer utilities across the country. Nor does it note that those “interests” can directly clash with the health and public safety interests of those who pay for CMU’s AMSA membership — namely, folks who pay their water bill, including those who live along creeks and streams that can carry millions of gallons of raw human sewage after large spills.
For years, AMSA has been fighting on the legal, regulatory and political fronts to weaken or nullify two of the linchpins of the 30-year-old Clean Water Act — that raw sewage cannot be allowed to escape into the environment without a permit, and that all sewage must be treated to secondary standards before it can safely be released back into the environment. The Clean Water Act has been widely credited with making thousands of once highly polluted American waters safe for swimming and human contact.
CMU higher-ups don’t appear to be concerned about using the public’s money to back AMSA’s political agenda. They say they don’t see it as a conflict of interest for CMU to use public funds to maintain a membership in a politically active lobbying organization, one of whose goals is less regulation for utilities like CMU. “We do not feel it necessary for our agency to officially ‘agree or disagree’ with every specific position that AMSA takes,” CMU spokesperson Vic Simpson said.
CMU also says it doesn’t consider AMSA’s primary role to be that of a political lobbying organization. “Our primary benefit from being an AMSA member is having access to information and science-based research,” said Simpson via email. “With that said, Charlotte-Mecklenburg is fully aware and supportive of AMSA’s role in the legislative process.”
Limits on water pollution aren’t all AMSA’s been fighting. According to a private section of AMSA’s website CMU allowed CL to view, AMSA is also fighting to exempt its members from a proposed rule that requires compliance with carbon monoxide emission limits and constant monitoring of carbon monoxide emissions from boilers and heaters. It also successfully fought against water pollution controls for the metal products and machinery industry.
But the list of things environmental and public health proponents have to say about AMSA aren’t all bad. Most applaud AMSA’s extensive efforts to secure hundreds of millions, and ultimately billions, in Congressional funding for improvements to the nation’s sanitary sewer systems that both sides argue need to be made to help stop sewer spills.
At the same time, others, like Nancy Stoner of the Natural Resources Defense Council, say AMSA’s positions on raw sewage are internally inconsistent.
“AMSA says that we should have a trust fund and have the federal government invest in sewage treatment, just as I say, but they also say that sewage in the water is no big deal,” said Stoner. “They minimize the significance of having untreated and partially treated sewage in the water, meanwhile they’re asking for money from US taxpayers that they say they need to address the problem.”
No one doubts that AMSA does indeed do a good job of educating its members about new technology, regulations and trends, and many people certainly applaud their advocacy for improving the nation’s sewer infrastructure. But it’s equally certain that AMSA has been a loud voice — often the loudest voice — at the forefront of nearly every clean water debate dealing with sewage regulation for the last three decades.
Lobbying For Less ResponsibilitySo what are the people of Charlotte-Mecklenburg getting in exchange for the money CMU sends to AMSA every year? According to critics, more dirty water and the public health risks that come with it.
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.
But what they don’t mention is that the supposed “zero tolerance” rule already has generous exceptions built in for spills caused by events that are reasonably beyond the control of system operators. They also won’t tell you that every discharge of untreated sewage has been illegal since the Clean Water Act passed 30 years ago. In other words, the new “zero tolerance” regulation isn’t suddenly going to burden utilities with some new, expensive, impossible-to-meet mandate that hasn’t already been in place for 30 years. The reality is that the new overflow rule that AMSA wants exceptions to already represents a weakening of the Clean Water Act. The “exceptions” AMSA is lobbying for would only weaken the rule even further — and provide legal cover for utilities.
“They want a blank check,” said Meyland. “It would be the end of the Clean Water Act as we know it today. It would be a disaster from a public health perspective.”
Meyland says those who are supposed to treat sewage shouldn’t get a special pass the public wouldn’t tolerate when it comes to other government-regulated safety hazards.
“We wouldn’t accept their definition of what they can prevent and cannot prevent if we were talking about bridges, if we were talking about dams, if we were talking about drinking water, if they said, “Well, you’re going to have clean drinking water except when the pipe breaks, except when some contaminant gets in there after we’ve already treated the water,'” said Meyland. “Think of it this way. We have two water infrastructure systems in this country. We’ve got the drinking water infrastructure and the sewage infrastructure. On the drinking water side, a public water supplier is responsible for water quality all the way to the tap. That’s a very high burden. You don’t hear the water suppliers saying, “Oh well, you know, uh, what can we do when the pipes settle or a big truck drives over the road and it displaces the water line and it starts to leak?’ You don’t hear them bellyaching about it. They understand that there’s a public health issue involved here. The sewer people, on the other hand, want to say, “If it makes it to the plant, great, we’ll treat it. If it doesn’t make it to the plant, as long as we made a good faith effort to keep the pipes in shape, it’s not our fault.’ That’s a completely bogus argument. If the water suppliers can keep the water clean so that you can drink it, the sewer people can at least keep the sewage in the pipes until it gets to the plant and then fully treat it like the law requires.”
Blender Full of TroubleAMSA is also currently fighting to allow something called “blending,” a practice in which partially treated sewage is released back into bodies of water along with fully treated sewage during storms or other wet weather events that increase water flow. AMSA’s position is that as long as the discharge produced by blending still doesn’t violate existing treatment standards for treatment plants, utilities should be able to do it.
But public health advocates say those standards only measure how well a plant is performing, not whether what is discharged from it is a danger to the public. Because plants aren’t violating treatment standards doesn’t mean that the partially treated material being released through blending doesn’t contain dangerous or potentially deadly materials.
“They’re putting back in sewage that’s full of viruses, that’s full of pathogens and full of all the other nasties,” said Meyland. “The quality of the raw sewage going back in through the blending process does in fact present a public health risk that’s unacceptable.”
Nancy Stoner, director of the Clean Water Project at the Natural Resources Defense Council, agrees.
“Blending also endangers public health because it does not provide effective treatment for the full range of pathogens,” said Stoner. “As a matter of fact, it works better on bacteria than on viruses and protozoa like cryptosporidium and giardia. So more blending also would increase the spread of waterborne illness.”
CMU maintains that blending isn’t much of an issue here.
“Blending is a practice that mostly affects communities with combined wastewater and storm water systems; the topic is not as much of an issue here in our region of the country due to the absence of combined wastewater/storm water systems,” Simpson said.
But it could be in the future. While the EPA currently allows some treatment facilities around the country to blend in certain circumstances, AMSA is seeking to make the practice universal. AMSA is also fighting a section of the proposed blending rule that would require utilities to demonstrate that “no feasible alternative” exists before releasing partially treated sewage back into the environment.
Why fight to allow more sewage into local waters, where people might come in contact with it? The general position of the EPA’s Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance is that the need for blending to handle heavy rain flow is the byproduct of poor system maintenance and inadequate treatment and storage capacity. In other words, there are only two ways to deal with more sewage in the nation’s treatment systems — spend the money to treat it to the minimum standards laid out in the Clean Water Act 30 years ago, or effectively lower those standards. AMSA appears to be taking the second route.
“Have your readers think about this,” said Meyland. “Where does all the waste go when a body is embalmed? When a body is taken into a mortuary? What comes out of a sewage treatment plant near a hospital? Every disease in the hospital. Where does it go? It goes into our sewer system. You tell me that the sewage coming out of a hospital is not hazardous or the full fluids out of a human body, they’re not hazardous? Plus manufacturing facilities dump into the sewer system and all sorts of commercial operations, plus what comes out of your household.”
AMSA takes a different view — that sewage isn’t as dangerous as most people think and isn’t known to pose a health risk, despite the fact that it has remained on the list of nationally recognized hazardous waste materials since Congress passed the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act in 1976.
In a May edition of Newsday, Krantz, AMSA’s government affairs manager, disputed that sewage overflows adversely affect public health.
“There’s a public perception that the stuff is icky, but there’s not scientific evidence to back up that ickiness,” he said.
In July 2002, Krantz told the Associated Press that, “Everyone wants to make this into a gigantic crisis situation when there’s not a sufficient degree of specific evidence that sewage sludge poses a danger.”
AMSA recently even went so far as to suggest, in a February letter to the EPA, that part of a report be altered to include “expert opinion” that “perhaps the total impact of sewer overflows on public health is relatively minor and that funds would be better spent implementing a “national hand-washing program'” rather than spending money to eliminate sewer spills.
On its website and in correspondence, AMSA has repeatedly insisted that there is little scientific data proving raw sewage or sewage sludge to be a significant public health threat. But in the past, when contradictory evidence made its way into scientific journals or received public attention, AMSA went to the mat to discredit it and the scientists behind it.
In June 2002, a research article by senior EPA microbiologist David Lewis about the dangers of exposure to sewage sludge in residential areas published in the BioMed Central Public Health journal found that a quarter of 54 residents studied who had been exposed to winds blowing from treated areas developed staphylococcus aureus infections of the skin and respiratory tract. Of the 54 cases surveyed, two resulted in death.
As the study circulated in the scientific community and interest in its findings began to grow, AMSA sprang into action. According to an entry in the regulatory section of its website, which only members can access, AMSA’s board of directors voted last fall to spend $3,000 on a “scientific review” of the study by Lewis and several colleagues, intended to cast doubt on its findings.
“Since its publication, the article has received significantly more attention than AMSA originally anticipated,” the site reads. “The goal of the proposed scientific review will be to underscore the limitations of the article and their potential impact on the conclusions; the review is not intended to personally discredit the authors of the article.”
But by then, a letter-writing campaign to the EPA by AMSA and Synagro Technologies, Inc., the largest marketer of sewage sludge in the US, had already successfully sought to do just that.
It appears that Lewis’ March 2002 speech before a group of DeSoto County Florida residents concerned about the use of human sludge by farmers was what finally pushed AMSA and Synagro, which AMSA lists as a corporate affiliate on its website, over the edge. Twenty days after the speech, in which Lewis assured county residents and the media that their health concerns were legitimate, a Synagro attorney wrote to AMSA to request the organization’s help in reining Lewis in. AMSA did just that in letters and other communication with Lewis’ boss at EPA, including a letter in April in which AMSA Executive Director Ken Kirk complained about an article Lewis wrote on sludge. By May, Lewis was fired. He’s still fighting the EPA in court.
This article appears in Sep 3-9, 2003.
