Scott Van Voorhis
It’s the biggest environmental cleanup project you’ve never heard of – likely more expensive than Boston’s ill-fated Olympic boondoggle or that cavernous convention center in the Seaport.
And if you live or do business in the Boston area, you are likely going to be paying the lion’s share of the costs, and all without a single vote by any of the state’s elected representatives.
In the waning days of the Obama Administration, the Environmental Protection Agency is poised to unleash sweeping new regulations that would transform the Charles River from generally clean – a remarkable accomplishment given its function for hundreds of years as a de facto cesspool – to pristine.
It’s a cost that could easily run into the billions of dollars and is likely to fall hardest not just on local taxpayers, but developers of badly needed new housing or, for that matter, new stores, offices and restaurants.
Yet as troubling as the cost is the process. Cut through all the jargon-laden government bureaucratese, and effectively what we are talking about is a huge local tax being imposed by a few well-meaning but unelected bureaucrats in Washington after being spurred on by local environmental groups.
“They are looking at a massive, new, unfunded mandate,” said Geoff Beckwith, executive director of the Massachusetts Municipal Associations. “What ends up happening is that communities will have these new requirements that will cost billions of dollars.”
At the center of this growing controversy is the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA could as early as this month impose tough new requirements aimed at staunching the flow of phosphorus and other pollutants into the Charles and other rivers, lakes and pond from suburban parking lots and streets across the state.
With the dumping of sewage now a thing of the past, federal environmental officials are now targeting municipal storm sewers that collect runoff and discharge it, untreated, into the Charles and other local waterways. The new MS4 permit aims to put an end to this practice by mandating a series of potentially very expensive actions to staunch the flow of contaminated runoff.
Suburban and town governments would be on the hook for paying for new “blue/green” infrastructure and extensive tracking mapping of all points where dirty runoff is, among many other things. That would likely lead local officials to boost commercial property taxes and maybe even hit businesses with new fees.
Developers are also on the firing line; they will be required to take steps to prevent runoff from construction sites as well as further measures to prevent stormwater runoff from parking lots and roofs into local rivers and lakes.
Meanwhile, two leading environmental groups, the Conservation Law Foundation and the Charles River Watershed Association, refiled a lawsuit last week against the EPA demanding a crackdown on existing industrial and commercial properties in addition to the big MS4 effort.
“While toxic runoff from large parking lots and industrial campuses continues to poison the Charles River, EPA has let the worst polluters off the hook,” CLF President Bradley Campbell, said in a statement. “It’s time for these companies and institutions to lead the cleanup effort.”
A Whole Lot Of Money
How much it will cost depends on who you ask, but there is no getting around the fact that we are talking about a lot of money. Critics like the Massachusetts Municipal Association point to some staggering numbers, such as the $18 billion over 20 years estimate put out by the Water Finance Infrastructure Commission. While the feds have held out the promise of some grant money, the MMA’s Beckwith argues it is likely to be no more than a fig leaf, with the EPA struggling to do its job with far less resources than it had 20 or 30 years ago.
Robert Zimmerman, executive director of the Charles River Watershed Association, whose group has been instrumental in pushing the new regs, calls such numbers “absurd” – and he is probably right.
Zimmerman noted one study, commissioned by Worcester, came in at nearly $2 billion to get the city into compliance with the new storm water regs – but it was based on possibly the most costly treatment plan ever devised by humankind, with hundreds of separate mini-water treatment plants stationed around the city.
Zimmerman pegs the total statewide cost at $1.8 billion over the next two decades. And, if anything, he would like to shorten the length of compliance time to a decade.
To give credit where credit is due, the Charles River Watershed Association, despite being the leading advocate for the new rules, likely has a firmer grasp of the true costs, working as a consultant with Boston, Franklin and other communities to devise solutions. But there are probably some overly optimistic assumptions baked in there as well.
Some developers may be able to meet the requirements through less expensive, natural means, including funneling stormwater and other runoff back into the earth, where it is naturally cleansed. Yet 50 percent of the region’s terrain is covered by ledge and less hospitable soils. Developers building on these sites would have to cough up as much as $150,000 per acre to install much more expensive subterranean catch basins.
That sounds significant, especially if you are building new apartments or condos that include subsidized affordable units.
In addition, the lawsuit filed by CLF and the Charles River Watershed Association urging tougher runoff standards for existing office buildings and apartment complexes could add billions more in costs, said David Begelfer, CEO of NAIOP Massachusetts, which represents developers across the state.
An Opaque Process
Still, even if we are only talking about $4 billion or $5 billion, and not $18 billion, as critics contend, that is a huge amount of money, about what it would have cost to foot the bill for the Olympics, overruns and all.
And while the Olympic proposal was subject to a spirited public debate – including a likely referendum if the plan had gone forward – the discussion over whether to spend billions more for a cleaner Charles is taking place in an arcane and often inscrutable regulatory forum.
Sure, there is a “public” process, but only a handful of activists and opponents are truly following or understand the complex regulatory proposal enough to meaningfully contribute. And since this huge new expense is being hashed out by regulators as opposed to legislators and voters, the discussion is essentially a narrow one.
That means the debate hinges on technical considerations, such as the virtues of swales in filtering runoff, instead of the wider issue. That means little or no discussion about the impact such a substantial, unfunded mandate would have on everything from the construction of new housing to the pressures it would put on local town and city budgets, from the hiring and firing of teachers to the funding for road work.
Is it a worthy cause? Sure, a cleaner Charles would be great – toxic algae blooms caused in part by fertilizer-laden runoff have emerged as a significant issue.
There are also side benefits to the various remediation efforts, which could boost the region’s capacity to naturally absorb stormwater at a time when global warming points to a future filled with far more frequent torrential downpours, Zimmerman notes.
Yet I have hard time seeing this as anything other than a massive diversion of precious tax dollars into a worthy but not necessarily compelling project at a time when the state’s roads and rail lines are crumbling and housing prices are soaring out of sight.
Financially stressed towns and taxpayers will be less likely to be open to other crucial expenses and initiatives, such as swallowing concerns about the impact on local schools by new proposals for apartments, condos and homes.
But a wide-ranging debate does not seem to be in the cards as the EPA gets ready to put the new regulations into action. And given the billions that will have to come out the pockets of taxpayers, businesses and developers, this is just incredible.
