Wastewater and water quality on Cape Cod is becoming a front and center economic development issue after decades of delay, as the science for measuring water quality has improved – and as the matter has gone to court.
Water quality on the Cape has been under study since at least 1978, when a master plan was created for Barnstable County, which covers most of the Cape. Subsequent federal cutbacks under the Reagan Administration, coupled with the inevitable local disagreements over home rule, citizen involvement, and funding sources stalled the process, while the Cape embarked on a residential building boom without sufficient oversight of protection of coastal water quality.
In 2010 and 2011, the Conservation Law Foundation filed two suits against the federal EPA alleging that the EPA’s failure to act on the 1978 plan has caused widespread nitrogen contamination that will now cost between $3 billion and $8 billion to clean up.
On March 21, the Patrick Administration, the State Treasurer’s Office, and the Cape Cod Commission (CCC), the Cape’s land use overseer, signed a memorandum of understanding to allocate $3.35 million to CCC to develop a cost-effective and environmentally-sound approach to managing Cape Cod’s water quality. The majority, $3 million, will go toward developing a plan to prioritize water resources, identifying the most impaired or endangered, and what local action is needed to achieve water quality goals as quickly as possible. An additional $350,000 will be used to build a Cape Cod Wastewater “SmartMap” and cost model, linking land-use data with newly developed scientific and financial planning data to help Cape communities identify environmentally appropriate and affordable wastewater infrastructure solutions.
Water Quality Top Issue
The main culprit is nitrogen in wastewater, 80 percent of which comes from residential septic systems. They’re not designed to filter nitrogen, which leeches the Cape’s porous soil, into the ground water and the aquifer, feeding algae. The resulting algae blooms kill fish, cause loss of eelgrass in marshland, and disruption of shellfish beds and fish spawning grounds.
The chamber’s surveys of its business members show water quality is one of their top issues, and regular citizens also recognize the importance of the issue, says Wendy Northcross, CEO of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce.
But not everyone is convinced. Tony Shepley, principle of Hyannis-based lumber company Shepley Wood Products, has a long history on the Cape. He started his company in 1978, the year that the first water management plan was introduced. He has more questions than answers: Why is water management re-emerging as a major issue when it’s been on the table for decades? How bad is the nitrogen loading in measurable terms? Who are the experts? What other areas of the country have already faced and solved similar challenges? What is the time table for real damage to thge ecosystem?
All reasonable questions, with the underlying one being: Will the policy being developed deliver the results for which it was intended? “I feel we are being asked a $ 4- billion to $ 7- billion question that no one really has much of a grasp on,” he says.
Scientific information is beginning to give a clearer picture of the problem. At the start, the nitrogen problem escaped public notice, Northcross says. “The enormity of the issue has revealed itself slowly. The fact that we didn’t know how long it took for wastewater to move through the ground and reach the lakes, ponds, kettle holes and coastal waters was also an issue – we now know more than we did even a few years ago.”
“Water quality still looks good if you look at it in daylight,” says CCC Executive Director Paul Niedzwiecki. “The most expensive thing for us to do as a community is nothing. … In the course of one generation, estuaries have been lost. If we don’t fix it now, our children won’t want to.” He estimates that an effective cleanup effort could result in water quality recovery within three to five years.
No Borders
The delay has many causes. First of all, watersheds don’t stop at town borders, and neither do costs. Some towns have proposed plans or have received consultant recommendations that far outstrip their ability to pay for the infrastructure, Northcross says. Other towns, such as Yarmouth, have rejected plans because they are waiting for a regional solution, believing that cost-sharing is the way to go. Other towns haven’t completed their planning. The chamber recommends that towns must collaborate, looking at solutions on a watershed by watershed basis, and come up with a scientifically sound and financially rational plan, which could bring the multi-billion-dollar price tag more toward the low end of the spectrum.
Christopher Kilian, clean water program director for the Massachusetts CLF, says the CLF reached an agreement in principle with the EPA in January 2012, representing broad terms that needed to be hammered out. But after nine months of negotiations, the agreement fell apart. Litigation is moving forward before the federal district court, and CLF is waiting for a court decision.
There’s some concern that the court might issue a mandate to sewer the Cape, a step which observers say could result in a costly, overbuilt system.
Kilian says a sewer mandate is possible, but that there are other options, including a decision to require all sources of nitrogen on the Cape require Clean Water Act permits. With that determination would come a requirement to demonstrate how specific effluent standards on discharge would be met. It’s possible, he says, that the court would issue an injunction that would drive remediation activity on the Cape.
He lauds the March 21 agreement, saying he is pleased to see it in line with what the CLF was requesting from the court in one of the two cases based on Section 208 of the Clean Water Act law. “We think it makes a lot of sense for this planning to go through, to arrive at solutions to contribute to the cleanup, to avoid the need for a federal permitting scheme,” he says.
Andrew Gottlieb, executive director of the Cape Cod Water Protection Collaborative, agrees that completely sewering the Cape would be financially unfeasible. Instead, a variety of technologies and options exist to address the problem, and all should be used for applications for which they make sense – which is, in fact, what the March 21 memorandum is aiming for.
The demographics of the Cape will play a crucial role in financial decisions. The Cape has the state’s largest proportion of residents age 65 and over, an increasing number of which are year-rounders living on fixed incomes. Gottlieb notes that a water plan for Barnstable County that restores water quality to historic levels as quickly as possible must be affordable to taxpayers, and use as little infrastructure as is needed.
“People who have come here later, those arriving less than 15 or 20 years ago, don’t have the association of what the resource used to be,” says Gottlieb. “Those most interested know what was lost. Older people remember what it was like .… We want to be sure we are not destroying something that brought us here in the first place.”
Email: coneill@thewarrengroup.com
