CLEVELAND, Ohio — Searching for a way to stop polluting overflows of their antiquated storm and sewer systems, growing numbers of U.S. cities are looking to green solutions that they hope will save millions, if not billions of dollars, while also helping to beautify blighted inner-city neighborhoods.
Last month, Akron Mayor Don Plusquellic announced that his city would join that movement, withdrawing its $1.4 billion long-term sewer cleanup plan – which involved boring deep tunnels beneath the existing sewer to catch the putrid soup of raw sewage and rainwater before it is expelled into nearby waterways.
“It’s not an amount our ratepayers can stomach or afford,” said Phil Montgomery, Akron’s deputy director of public service. “And we’re looking to do something about it.”
To that end, the city will explore the cost-savings potential of so-called “green infrastructure,” above-ground features that mimic nature by using grass, trees and soil to help rainwater soak slowly into the ground or evaporate before it has a chance to flood the system.
In contrast, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District is as committed as ever to its $3 billion plan to solve its overflow conundrum with mostly tunnels while giving minimal attention to a greener approach that city planners and redevelopment advocates say could transform some of Cleveland’s 20,000 vacant parcels into lush landscapes. The district has set aside $80 million — 2.6 percent of the entire budget — for green technology.
This rendering shows a sewer district ‘green’ infrastructure project in Cleveland’s Slavic Village neighborhood.
Sewer district Executive Director Julius Ciacca and his team believe that green projects have their place in an overflow prevention strategy. But cheaper or not, the technology is still unproven in large-scale applications, they say. And when aiming to meet a series of strict federally mandated benchmarks, potentially paying more for a reliable outcome is better than gambling on green.
“It needs to be a balancing act,” said Kellie Rotunno, the sewer district’s director of engineering and construction. “When you’re dealing with combined sewer overflow, (tunnels) are a crucial piece, because you can get a large volume out in a short period of time. …. It may be arguably more expensive than green infrastructure, but we can get it implemented in a much shorter period of time, addressing the environmental impact, which we think is really the issue that needs to be talked about.”
Sewer District: It’s not easy going ‘green.’
Sewer district officials contend that no number of green approaches – water retention basins, or other above-ground, water-absorbing landscaping – would ever solve the region’s problem on their own. Their reasoning: It takes a great volume of rainwater flowing through a retention pond to equal one gallon of sewer overflow underground.
And in a region aiming to purge four billion gallons of water and sewage overflow from its system, that’s a heavy lift for green technology.
Philadelphia, widely viewed as a green infrastructure pioneer, is the sewer district’s favorite example of a city that has set what the district calls unrealistic goals for its green methods of managing sewer overflow. That city’s water department, which is under a consent order with the state of Pennsylvania rather than the federal government, aims to install between 8,000 and 12,000 acres of green projects in the next two decades to bring its combined sewer overflow level down to 8 billion gallons a year.
That’s still higher than Northeast Ohio’s current level, Ciaccia notes.
As of this writing, and after two years of work, Philadelphia has about 100 acres of piecemeal projects throughout the city. And Ciaccia contends that the city faces a long, unpredictable road ahead. (Return to cleveland.com next week for more on the pros and cons of Philadelphia’s green projects.)
To pass muster with the U.S. EPA, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District needs to be able to control its project sites permanently and guarantee that land will never be reclaimed for development. Mayors, struggling with the reality of population loss, can be reluctant to cede once-developed land to be transformed permanently into green space, sewer district officials say.
Determining who will pay to maintain the plant life and clear debris from those sites is another headache – one the sewer district hopes to avoid.
The district also argues against the general assumption that green storm water management features are welcome in every neighborhood.
Some green projects look rather unassuming, taking the form of trees along the roadside, planted above a culvert that diverts rainwater from the combined sewer to the root system. But others appear as grassy basins — uneven ground, unsuitable for recreation when dry and waterlogged after a heavy rain. And in a city as poor as Cleveland, those basins run the risk of becoming neglected, trash-strewn eyesores. Getting residents to embrace the concept is tougher than it may seem, the district says.
Add to all of those concerns the process of negotiating terms of a consent decree with the federal government under the threat of lawsuit — an experience that sewer district officials describe as stressful, protracted and demoralizing.
In 2006, federal regulators called for the district to eliminate 97 percent of its combined sewer overflow by 2036. Failing to hit certain benchmarks showing a permanent reduction in the amount of sewage pouring into the environment would trigger massive fines.
Throughout most of the district’s negotiation, the regulatory climate heavily favored tunnels and improvements to water treatment facilities over green options, Ciaccia says.
But late in the negotiations, the federal government raised the bar for the sewer district – demanding that the sewer overflow be reduced by one more percentage point. Trying to give ratepayers a reprieve, the district pushed for permission to incorporate green infrastructure in the plan to capture those final gallons of overflow. They argued it would cost half as much as expanding the diameter of a tunnel.
They won the battle. The 10 green projects that resulted will cost $80 million and collectively prevent 46 million gallons of sewage from emptying into the lake. (See our sidebar highlighting NEORSD’s proposed green projects.)
In a recent interview, U.S. EPA officials said that the sewer district’s consent decree was the first in the country to require a green component.
Before then, green infrastructure largely was considered a tool to reduce the impact of storm water pollution in regions with systems that separate rainwater and sewage. Retention ponds and other green features capture storm water before it picks up pollutants on city streets and surfaces and is discharged to the environment.
In areas served by combined rainwater and sewage systems, green features can handle the first inch of rainfall effectively, the officials said. Beyond that, however, the overflow defaults to the sewer system below, where deep tunnels and reservoirs can catch huge volumes of water and sewage after the heaviest rains.
Only in the last several years have cities begun blending green and gray solutions to achieve cost-savings and other benefits to the community, said EPA Region 5 Administrator Susan Hedman. And toward that end, the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District is well-positioned with flexible terms in its consent decree that allow the district to swap tunnels for above ground green features, wherever it makes sense.
“The way this consent decree was structured – to allow the district, at any time, to switch to green infrastructure alternatives that are more cost-effective – is an indication that no opportunities have been lost here,” Hedman said, adding that she believes the district’s consent decree was on the “leading edge” of green infrastructure. “As Cleveland reclaims more vacant land in neighborhoods where storm water management is needed most, the opportunities can be captured while implementing this plan over the next 25 years.”
Cost comparison can be tricky
But Ciaccia and his team of engineers have conveyed to the sewer district board, as well as to advocates and reporters, that going any further with green infrastructure – replacing entire stretches of tunnel with a series of above-ground features — would be more expensive than just sticking with so-called gray technology.
They point to numbers that show the sewer district’s green projects cost $1.79 per gallon of sewage overflow reduction, compared to a thrifty 75 cents per gallon for traditional, underground infrastructure.
But the sewer district’s comparison is misleading.
The proposed green projects are being used only to eliminate the most expensive portion of the overflow — that final percentage point the federal government pushed for — after the $3 billion in giant tunnels, pipes and other traditional features already are built.
Expanding the diameter of those tunnels to capture that extra percentage point of sewer sludge would cost $2.79 per gallon.
What the district’s analysis fails to estimate is how much the district would have paid per gallon had it considered using green technology from the beginning. That figure would provide a fair comparison to the 75 cents per gallon the district will spend on gray infrastructure.
District officials say they have not done that calculation.
Yet, at a January sewer board meeting, during which members asked Ciaccia about the cost of tunnels vs. green projects, the director maintained that tunnels were most cost-effective.
“In our case, and it’s going to be different in every city, it’s looking more expensive to do green,” Ciaccia said.
During that same meeting, Rotunno characterized the publicity generated by Philadelphia’s green storm water management project as “propaganda.”
Consent decree do-over?
The sewer district’s deal with the federal government allows it to swap out underground projects for green ones, as long as the district still hits its regulatory benchmarks.
But the district has never studied incorporating green into its plan from the ground-up – and district officials say they don’t intend to. That would require fundamentally changing projects that already are planned.
Rotunno acknowledged in a recent interview that the inertia of the consent decree negotiations left the district hamstrung, restricted in how and where it could use green infrastructure to achieve its goals. If she were negotiating it today, she said, she would seek even more flexibility to invest in green projects wherever the city or developers were turning dirt.
But, she added that she doesn’t want to upend the green projects already planned and start over.
“Right now, the train’s on the tracks and we’ve got green projects that are cost-effective compared to the requirement in the consent decree,” Rotunno said. “I don’t know that we would want to pull the rug out from under the projects. I think those projects are moving forward.”
Since the district forged its consent decree, members of the National League of Cities and the U.S. Mayors Conference have called upon the U.S EPA to allow more flexibility in how regions handle their sewage overflow problems.
The EPA responded with a series of memoranda, encouraging its regional offices to promote green alternatives when they make sense and to help cities develop so-called “integrated plans,” which take a comprehensive approach to solving water quality issues.
In a recent interview, Ciaccia said the district has notified the U.S. EPA that it wishes to reopen its consent decree – not to find ways to reduce the number of tunnels, but rather, to develop an integrated plan.
A revision or a supplement to the consent decree could grant the district permission to address other contributors to water pollution first – such as agricultural run-off – if a study reveals that those problems are more dire for the health of Lake Erie than the combined sewer overflow issue.
But Ciaccia acknowledged that while the federal government might be inclined to give the district more time to achieve all of its goals under an integrated plan, sewage overflow would have to be addressed eventually, if not first.
And in the end, that approach might cost you and your neighbors even more.
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Your feedback, questions and story ideas will shape our future coverage of Northeast Ohio’s controversial tunnel project and the green vs. gray infrastructure debate. What aspects of this story deserve more attention? We invite your thoughts. Email us at latassi@cleveland.com.
Series continues next week at cleveland.com/drain.
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