Why Should I Pay to Clean Up the Mess in Long Island Sound that Mamaroneck and New Rochellle and Rye and Larchmont Helped Create?

These editorial writers agree with me -- if the cost of upgrading Westchester's four Long Island Sound sewage treatment plants is too high for the residents of those four sewer districts to bear, let's consider spreading the cost over the whole county.

But for the sake of discussion, let's look at it another way.

If you live in Mamaroneck, Rye, New Rochelle, Port Chester, Larchmont, Pelham Manor, Harrison, or part of Scarsdale and White Plains, it's your sewage -- not mine -- that's contributing to the pollution problem. Your sewage is helping create the dead zone in the part of the Sound near you. Mine is going into a septic system that I had a couple of thousand dollars to replace when I moved into my house eight years ago.

For decades you have been dumping your sewage into the Sound but not paying the true cost; instead, you've been transfering the cost to the Long Island Sound ecosystem. The Sound has subsidized your economc well being by serving as a place where you could dump your sewage without paying the true cost. And now you want to ask me to pay to help clean up your mess.

I might agree to do so -- in fact, I'm inclined to agree to do so (although I can't speak for my neighbors elsewhere in Pound Ridge, or in Bedford, where they have their own sewage problems, or Yorktown, where they're paying to upgrade a sewage plant that empties into New York City's drinking water, or elsewhere in northern or western Westchester. But I tend to think saving Long Island Sound is worthwhile.

But how is it as much my problem as it is yours? Explain to me why I should pay to solve the problem you helped create?

If you've read my book or heard me talk, you might remember this quote, which Al Appleton said at a meeting to discuss the Sound cleanup, in 1990 in Rye:

"Pollution is free garbade disposal. It's using a public resource to subsidize a private activity. All we're really asking private activities to do is pay the true cost of doing business. We who are the public no longer want to use Long Island Sound to subsidize certain kinds of economic activities."

10:30 a.m.: I should add that this is a bit of a straw-man argument: the county government isn't formally proposing to spread the cost out (they want to get out of having to pay it); the only people proposing to share the costs are the editorial writers and me, and it's a question as to which of us has the least influence on public policy.

Hundreds of Millions of Dollars Have Been Spent But Conditions in Long Island Sound Have Not Improved

Is Long Island Sound getting cleaner? Is hypoxia becoming less severe? Those are questions worth knowing the answers to. The Long Island Sound cleanup has been going on for more than a decade. Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on sewage treatment plant upgrades, and hundreds of millions more are still to be spent, all with an eye to restoring the Sound in just seven more years.

So how are we doing? The Connecticut DEP put together a handful of interesting graphs illustrating water quality trends over the last 17 years and made them available recently. I think they show that if you judge by the worst conditions – that is, dissolved oxygen concentrations below 2 milligrams per liter – the Sound is getting better, or at least it’s not getting worse.

But if you judge by the goal of having as little as possible of the Sound fall below 3.5 milligrams per liter, conditions are getting worse.

Here’s the first graph (you can click on them to make them bigger):



It shows the number of square miles of the Sound in which dissolved oxygen fell below 3.5 milligrams per liter each summer since 1991. There have been some really bad years – 1994, 1995 and 2003, for example – but the trend is clearly up. Two of the five worst years were 2007 and 2006, and both were well over the median (286, in 1998).

What, on the other hand, happened in 1997, when only 51 square miles were affected? Possibly an August hurricane to mix things up?


This graph shows how long hypoxia lasted, when it started and when it ended. Conditions were clearly better in the mid 1990s through 2000 than they have been in recent years.

The first two graphs use 3.5 milligrams of oxygen per liter of water as a standard. Dave Simpson and his fellow researchers at the Connecticut DEP have figured out than when dissolved oxygen concentrations are between 3 and 3.9 milligrams per liter, the biomass of fish living in the deepest part of the Sound is reduced by 4 percent (compared to when conditions are optimal). What is biomass? I think it basically means the total weight of all the fish they catch during their standardized research trawls.

When dissolved oxygen is between 2 and 2.9 milligrams per liter, biomass is reduced by 41 percent. When it’s between 1 and 1.9, biomass is reduced by 82 percent – in other words, the amount of fish is only 18 percent of what it should be. And when DO falls below 1, the reduction is 100 percent. So the reason for wanting dissolved oxygen to be 3 or higher is obvious, as is the reason for not wanting it to drop too low.

Here are two graphs that show the number of square miles with DO below 1 and below 2. I’m not sure what to make of them, except to say that conditions were bad in 2003 but have gotten better since.

Looking for $18 Million in North Hempstead

North Hempstead decided that it didn’t like a plan to divert its sewage away from Long Island Sound and to treatment plants on the south shore of the island, and so it let a state deadline to get $18 million for the project pass. The diversion would have amounted to a nitrogen removal project, to meet the Sound cleanup’s 58.5 percent goal.

Now the town wants to use the $18 million to do actual nitrogen removal at its treatment plants and the state is saying sorry, you’re too late. Here.

In Connecticut, Norwich is paying a lot more for its sewage treatment upgrades (here). Norwich is one of a handful of Connecticut cities that still have combined sewers – that is sewers designed to carry sewage and rainwater, and to bypass treatment plants in wet weather – but it has separated 27 of its 42 sections of combined sewers (in other words, there are only – still? – 15 places where raw sewage pours into local rivers when it rains).

Report: Westchester Wants Out of Sound Cleanup

Westchester County wants to be let out of its obligation to help clean up Long Island Sound. The Journal News reported yesterday that the county is asking to be absolved of having to upgrade sewage treatment plants to meet the Sound cleanup’s 58.5 percent nitrogen reduction goal set for 2014 – a goal that all of the treatment plants emptying into the Sound have to meet:

Westchester County officials are asking to be released from the requirements, arguing that the upgrades would be expensive and would bring little or no improvement in water quality….

Westchester has filed plans with the state to improve its plants on Long Island Sound, but County Executive Andrew Spano's administration is grousing publicly about the cost of correcting what they portray as a minute portion of the problem.

While many environmentalists are eager to see the county do the work, Spano and Deputy County Executive Larry Schwartz have sought to downplay the importance of the 4,200 pounds of nitrogen coming daily from four county treatment plants. Schwartz said the plants - primarily the ones in Mamaroneck and New Rochelle - add less than 1 percent of the nitrogen that gets to the Sound from all sources, including the atmosphere.

Officials won't say how much the Westchester upgrades would cost, but Schwartz called it the "mother of all mandates."

"And then the question is, what happens if it doesn't work?" he said.

Unfortunately there aren't any other details about what form the county's request has taken.

A Look at the Sound Cleanup, 20 Years Later

It was 20 years ago this month that Long Island Sound went through its worst period of hypoxia, with fish dying and a huge part of the western half of the Sound turned into a dead zone. The Stamford Advocate uses the anniversary to assess progress in the Sound cleanup, here.

The reporter, Tim Stelloh, does a good job summarizing the progress, or lack of it. He points out, for example, that $617 million has been spent and yet conditions in the far western end of the Sound are barely better than they were 20 years ago.

He quotes me as saying that it's critical to get New York City to complete its sewage treatment plant upgrades, but I think he does not pay enough attention overall to New York City's role. The city, after all, is responsible for a huge proportion of the nitrogen that causes hypoxia, and until it makes substantial improvements, dissolved oxygen concentrations aren't going to get a whole lot better. That's my opinion but it's based on what knowledgeable people involved in the cleanup have been saying for years. (And no one should infer that I think the city is not making progress.)

He also finds a number of people to say -- quite reasonably -- that fixing sewage plants and removing nitrogen will not be enough to restore the Sound. That's obviously true and it's why the Long Island Sound program has from the beginning included a habitat restoration component and the Long Island Sound stewardship component. But the story makes it seem as if the people he is quoting have a fundamental disagreement with the way the cleanup is being managed. I don't think that's true. When Robin Kriesberg of Save the Sound says there needs to be a more holistic approach, she's not implying that nitrogen removal is a flawed strategy. And the story does not point out that many of the people quoted are involved in the Long Island Sound cleanup program, which was set up partially as a way for experts to debate and challenge the cleanup strategies.

The story also gives way, way too much space and credence to Art Glowka. Art is a nice guy and has a long and illustrious history of effective environmental advocacy. But to give substantial space in the story to a non-scientist who claims that the Sound's problem is that it doesn't have enough nitrogen is really taking contrarianism to an unhelpful level. Glowka, for example, apparently thinks that New York City's role in the Sound's problems is negligible. The story describes him pointing to a map and asserting that at this point here, near Throgs Neck, the city's sewage stops and doesn't enter the Sound. It neglects to mention that 20 years of computer modeling indicate that the city's sewage has a substantial affect on the Sound. Nowhere does the story say, or quote anyone as saying, "We're glad Art is involved but the scientific consensus is that nitrogen is a problem and New York City is a significant contributor to it."

To the average reader some of that is inside baseball, though. There's lots of useful stuff in the story. Given what happened 20 years ago and all that has happened since, I hope it's just the first of many anniversary accounts.

I don't generally make a point of soliciting comments, but I'd be interested in hearing what people think about the various points of view in the story.

Renewal in the Sound (in the New York Times)

For those looking for a concise summary of the situation on Long Island Sound, you could do worse than the editorial the Times ran in the weekly sections yesterday. It includes a tiny bit of history, a summary of the problems and the symptoms, and a call for more government funding. As for nitrogen reduction, it says this.

The results, so far, have been impressive — a 25- to 30-percent reduction in nitrogen, roughly speaking, a figure that is sure to improve once an agreement struck last year between New York City and Albany to upgrade four plants along the East River kicks in. These plants produce nearly half the nitrogen that enters the Sound, and it is not stretching things to say that failure to live up to this agreement, which will cost the city at least $700 million, could ruin the entire effort.

Backsliding by the city would also gravely insult the local communities that, at considerable cost, have tried to reduce their own contribution to the problem. Norwalk and Stamford, Conn., have been particularly aggressive in upgrading their treatment plants. Westchester County, which was lagging, has become much more active.

(The truth is, we're still waiting to see Westchester's nitrogen reduction plan, but that's a minor point, I guess.)

Spreading The Cost of the Sound Cleanup Throughout Westchester

If you think that people living in Tarrytown, say, on the Hudson River, would benefit if Long Island Sound were in better shape, then you’d be in favor of a proposal in Westchester County to spread the cost of nitrogen removal at the county’s four Sound shore plants among all of Westchester’s sewer districts. As it stands now, people in the district served by the plant in Mamaroneck, for example, pay all of the costs for improving the Mamaroneck plant. Ditto for the treatment plants in New Rochelle, Rye and Port Chester.

The county also has sewage plants in Yonkers, Ossining and Peekskill (like all the county treatment plants, they serve areas that are bigger than the municipalities they’re located in). The county Board of Legislators recently decided to spread operational costs for all seven plants among residents of all seven districts. The next step, if it’s approved, is to do the same for capital costs, which includes the nitrogen removal projects that are needed for the cleanup of Long Island Sound.

No one has said publicly how much those costs will be. The Journal News reports that there could be “potentially hundreds of millions of dollars worth of improvements.” Hundreds of millions of dollars covers a big range but from what I’m hearing, it’s accurate if you assume it won’t be in the low part of that range. Spreading the costs among more people might be the only way the county can afford it.

No Pork For the Sound

Democrats in Congress are trying to control pork barrel spending, which is good. Unfortunately EPA’s Long Island Sound office, which is coordinating the clean up of the Sound, is mostly funded by Congressional pork. Bush’s budget includes just $770,000 for the Sound program; the rest of the program’s $2.5 million comes from Congressional earmarks, a/k/a pork. The Stamford Advocate explains.

Connecticut Municipalities Pushing to Double the Clean Water Fund

There’s an important meeting in Hartford going on now to discuss Connecticut’s Clean Water Fund, which is where Connecticut’s share of the money for the Long Island Sound cleanup comes from. David Funkhouser has a preview in today’s Courant.

He reports that DEP Commissioner Gina McCarthy is looking into reforming (perhaps) the way the Clean Water Fund is administered.

And although Soundkeeper/Legislator Terry Backer has been pushing for $70 million a year in the fund, David reports that some people want a whole lot more:

The fund needs up to $160 million next year and just under $140 million the following year "to get Connecticut back up to where it should have been," said Gian-Carl Casa, director of legislative services for the Connecticut Conference of Municipalities. "A large number of projects are ready to go, and the funding isn't available for them."