Westchester Gets An Extension to Meets Its Sound Clean Up Goal

New York State environmental regulators have given Westchester County an additional three years, until 2017, to finish upgrading its Long Island Sound sewage treatment plants to meet state and federal nitrogen removal goals.

Westchester contributes only a small fraction of the nitrogen that causes the Sound's hypoxia problem, but it discharges that nitrogen directly into the part of the Sound that is most heavily effected. And conditions were bad last summer. (The maps that show the extent of hypoxia in 2008 are not up yet on the Connecticut DEP website but you can see maps from earlier years here. Click on any of the August maps and look for the black area, indicating the worst hypoxia conditions -- it's the area off Westchester, Nassau and part of Fairfield county.)

Connecticut, New York and the US EPA, with the support of local governments throughout the region, set the nitrogen reduction goal in 1998. The county was an enthusiastic supporter of the Sound cleanup, until it realized how much it was going to cost -- about $235 million. Here's what the Journal News reported:

To make the local improvements, the county would need to borrow the money over 30 years and charge higher rates for the 38,414 households and 6,804 businesses across the four districts.

The bulk of the new rates would go into effect in 2014, with incremental increases starting in 2010.

County officials note that it could have been worse: The state negotiated a smaller project and extended the deadline for completion three years to 2017.

Under earlier terms of the requirement, Westchester would have been required to spend an additional $100 million for the renovations.

New York State granted New York City a three-year extension three years ago. Connecticut seemed to falter on its way to meeting the 2014 goal when state legislators and the governor for years neglected the state's clean water fund (I'm not sure if they're back on track, but it's worth pointing out that Connecticut's clean water fund does provide state money to local governments for the Sound cleanup, something that New York State does not do).

If you need background, it's here, here and here. And there's plenty more here, at the Long Island Sound Study website.

The three-year extension for Westchester came after long negotiations between the county administration and the state. The county Board of Legislators still must approve it. There's a public hearing on Monday, December 8.

Acting Locally: in Westport, It's 'Paper or Paper?' In Westchester, Lawn Fertilizer Restrictions May Be on the Way In.

Westport last week became the first community east of the Mississippi to ban merchants from offering plastic bags to customers (thanks to my friends at Citizens Campaign for the Environment for the heads up). (11:13 A.M. -- Note the correction in the comments section)

And Westchester County will hold a hearing today on a bill that would restrict on the use and sale of phosphorus fertilizers, to protect up-county reservoirs,, prevent all lawn fertilizer use from November through March, and start a county-sponsored public education campaign designed to reduce the use of nitrogen fertilizers, to protect Long Island Sound. If I learn why the law doesn't restrict the sale and use of fertilizers with nitrogen, I'll let you know.

Nitrogen, of course, is the key cause of the low dissolved oxygen problem that hits the western half of the Sound each summer. Essentially all of the Sound off Westchester County had dissolved oxygen concentrations near zero late last month, which means a big part of the Sound was essentially worthless as habitat, as usual. I say "as usual," although Save the Sound notes that this year was probably worse that usual (I'm linking to this story, here, -- where's the apostrophe in the headline? -- because Save the Sound's press release doesn't seem to be online. Wednesday update: it's online now, here).

New York Wants to Help Westchester County Meets Its Obligation to Help Clean Up Long Island Sound

I don't see why, if New York City gets an extra three years to meet its nitrogen reduction goal, Westchester shouldn't get the same extension. It's not fair to Connecticut, of course, where exemplary communities like Stamford and Norwalk exceeded the 2014 goal of 58.5 percent reduction in nitrogen years ago, but it's hard to argue that a three-year delay is fine for New York City and its massive nitrogen input but not OK for Westchester with its much smaller nitrogen input.

But after reading this story about Governor Spitzer meeting with Westchester officials, I wonder just how much more time the state will grant Westchester and whether it's really the first step toward letting Westchester County off the hook in terms of its sewage upgrade responsibilities. I agree completely with Nancy Seligson:

Nancy Seligson, a Mamaroneck town councilwoman who is active in the bi-state and federal effort to clean the Sound, said more time would help, but she stressed that the focus should be on finding state and federal money for the work, not to evade the requirement altogether.

"I think it's fine if they could have additional time to try and figure out less expensive ways to accomplish the nitrogen reductions, but I still think the nitrogen reductions have to happen," she said.

One other point worth making about the news story. The phrase "state-mandated" makes it sound as if Westchester County was reluctantly dragged into this from the beginning. While it's certainly true that the previous county administration did everything in its power to resist upgrading sewage plants, the current administration campaigned on a "clean up the Sound" platform. So even though technically the upgrade is a state mandate, it was agreed to in cooperation with Connecticut and the US EPA, and Westchester County was strongly in favor of it, until they saw how much it was going to cost.

Westchester's Treatment Plant Upgrade Dilemma

What should Westchester County do? Its sewage treatment plants discharge 4552 pounds of nitrogen a day into the heart of Long Island Sound's dead zone (click here for summer hypoxia maps and look for the blotches of black and dark red, usually in mid to late August). The county has enthusiastically advocated for the Sound cleanup. But now its says that upgrading its four Sound shore treatment plants so they meet the 2014 goal of a 58.5 percent reduction in nitrogen would cost residents of the four sewer districts from about $472 to $1200 a year for 30 years. Because of that cost, the county wants the state to extend the deadlines for the work, although from this story it's not clear if it wants to extend the interim deadlines or the 2014 deadline.

My solution: change the law so that all of Westchester becomes one sewer district, and then spread the cost among all county property tax payers; in exchange for that, work with New Rochelle and Mamaroneck and Rye so that they make it easier and cheaper for all county residents to use their beaches and public boat ramps.

The other way to look at the cost is like this: property tax payers in the four Sound districts will pay $1.29 to $3.29 a day to do their fair share in cleaning up the Sound. I don't think that cost is so outrageous.

A Special Award for TruGreen ChemLawn

As someone who has long detested the amount of time and energy (in the form of greenhouse-gas emitting leaf blowers and mowers) spent on lawns, I was pleased to see that a New England watchdog group called the Toxics Action Center gave out a bunch of "awards" yesterday in Hartford to polluters and included one of the big so-called lawn care companies:

The group also cited the TruGreen ChemLawn Corp. for "blazing a new toxic path for chemical use" and urged the company to adopt environmentally friendly lawn care practices.

Bravo. Among other reasons chemical lawn products are an abomination, nitrogen fertilizers are among the culprits in Long Island Sound's hypoxia crisis.

"The future of Long Island Sound is no budget annoyance"

Insiders who follow Long Island Sound issues have known for some time that Westchester's sewage treatment upgrade costs would be scarily high -- why else would the County, which has been working on the sewage issue for almost a decade and which generally moves aggressively on environmental issues, have been so quiet about it for so long? -- but it wasn't until last week that we knew the actual numbers: an estimated $355 million to $573 million (background here and here).

The Times reported the numbers last week, in a story about a dispute between the county and New York State over whether a pollution-credit trading program would work in New York.

An editorial in yesterday's Times professes not to care how Westchester goes about doing its part of the Sound cleanup, as long as it does it. Here is an excerpt:

Westchester may flinch at the threat of localized taxpayer pain, but it should not use that to shrink from addressing an urgent regional problem. The money and means for upgrades must be found, whether indirectly through nitrogen trading or straight from taxpayers’ wallets.

The price will be high but not necessarily ruinous — the early cost estimates for New York City’s sewage-plant upgrades ran to more than $1 billion, until an aggressive search for economizing and efficiency brought the number sharply down. And there should be federal money available for protecting the Sound.

The future of Long Island Sound is no budget annoyance to be haggled down or bargained to death. It took considerable pressure from the federal government to get New York City on the right path, and backsliding is a continual peril. The Sound is as threatened as it is precious — the water is warming and lobsters and salt marshes have been dying, for reasons no one has precisely figured out.

Sharing Long Island Sound's Upgrade Costs: More on Westchester's Dilemma

I wrote yesterday about Westchester County's sewage upgrade dilemma, which boils down to this: the county is facing a huge nitrogen removal cost at its Long Island Sound plants but the way its sewer districts are set up, that cost must be paid by only a relatively small portion of the county's population.

I wrote that I, a county resident who does not live in a sewer district, would consider an increase in my county taxes to pay for the Sound cleanup but first I'd like to have an idea of how much that increase might be.

Edward J. Bateson, chairman of the Town of Fairfield's Water Pollution Control Authority the commission that oversees how Fairfield's sewage system is run -- sent me his thoughts on the issue, and they're similar to mine: Long Island Sound is worth the extra cost. Here's what he wrote:

Apportionment of treatment plant upgrade costs over indirect users of the sewer system is a tough sell.

In Fairfield, CT about a decade ago we dealt with the subject. As a municipality we spread the $38 million upgrade cost over the entire towns' tax base, not just sewer users. I believe we are only one of two towns in CT to take this approach.

I was originally opposed to this. After months of debate I changed my mind. I changed my mind for several reasons. The main reason being that it aint all about nitrogen removal goals, engineering studies and low contract bidders; it is about Long Island Sound. It is our legacy and the example we set for generations to come.

All of us benefit from clean water - even those that do not have their sewage treated at the plants in question. Why should I pay for a highway upstate that I have never used, and probably never will use? Its' what we do. Collaborative resources to advance the publics' best interest. In this case the best interest of the public being a cleaner Long Island Sound.

Connecticut Gets EPA Award for Innovative Program While the State Dithers on Funding for the Sound Cleanup. (Why Doesn't NY Have a Trading Program?)

The U.S. EPA gave an award to Connecticut yesterday for its program of allowing sewage treatment plant operators from around the state to buy and sell credits for reducing the amount of nitrogen they dump into Long Island Sound.

The award is a great example of rewarding the good (the trading program) and ignoring the bad (Connecticut’s complete irresponsibility in refusing the put money into its Clean Water Fund) that might work with a naughty 6-year-old but probably will prompt legislators and Governor Rell to pat themselves on the back and continue to ignore the funding issue.

On the other hand, by singling out Connecticut’s nitrogen trading for praise, EPA implicitly asks why New York doesn’t have a similar program. This news story asks the question explicitly and reports that New York State’s answer is, apparently, “We don’t allow a nitrogen trading program because we don’t allow a nitrogen trading program.”

The New York state Department of Environmental Conservation responded to questions about the issue with an e-mailed statement that the state had chosen to require each plant to meet a specific limit. The e-mail, from agency spokeswoman Lori O'Connell, gave no reason for not using the trading program, except to say that "the loading limits established for (each treatment plant) will result in lower levels of nitrogen reaching the Sound."

The same story makes the excellent point, from Westchester County’s view, that a trading program might be cheaper and more efficient than the one-size-fits-all approach:

With New York state's sewage plants on the Sound facing the same requirements, Westchester officials have asked Albany in the past to allow a similar credit-trading program. Such an initiative might help the county avoid costly work that would otherwise be needed mostly at the county's sewage treatment plants in New Rochelle and Mamaroneck, said Deputy County Executive Larry Schwartz.

The state has rejected the idea.

"The state of New York is being shortsighted in trying to force counties like Westchester to take the most expensive and onerous route toward taxpayers in helping reduce nitrogen loading in Long Island Sound," Schwartz said yesterday. "They have refused and neglected to pursue and implement less costly options, including creating a New York state nitrogen-trading program."

Here’s EPA’s press release (see if you can find the one big error in it).

EPA’s announcement, by the way, received zero coverage, from what I can tell, in Connecticut newspapers, which presumably saw it as pure PR and therefore not newsworthy. Obviously a bit of awareness and imagination could have turned it into a good story – “Connecticut receives EPA award for an innovative program while the state’s elected officials continue to dither on the funding for the Sound cleanup.”

(Two papers, however, rewrote an EPA press release also issued yesterday that announced a bunch of grants for governments and non-profits working on the Sound, here and here.)

The good news though is that, coincidentally, Leah Schmalz of Save the Sound/CFE had an op-ed piece ready to go in the Hartford Courant. It implicitly highlights the irony of giving Connecticut an award while its elected officials ignore the Sound’s funding needs:

When the federal government and the state of Connecticut promised the state's citizens clean and healthy water 30 years ago, the goal was to stop the two billion gallons of raw sewage that enters our waterways each year by separating combined sewer overflows and to restore the "dead zone" in Long Island Sound by removing approximately 60 percent of the nitrogen discharges from the sewage treatment plants in the state.

Despite years of great progress, the Clean Water Fund - the primary mechanism for funding those wastewater treatment and sewer projects in Connecticut - began to fall apart when the legislature decided to shift that money to other non-water-related purposes in 2002.

The effect of this failure to adequately invest in the Clean Water Fund began to accelerate.

The value of a well-financed Clean Water Fund to protect the public's health became painfully clear in 2005. That year Hartford's city sewer flooded the basements of local residents with raw sewage and the number of beach closings increased to 200 - a nearly 10 percent increase from the previous year.

The value of a well-financed Clean Water Fund was reinforced in 2006 when inadequate funding for nitrogen reduction forced the state Department of Environmental Protection to approve the discharge of more than 1.5 million more pounds of oxygen-depleting nitrogen into Long Island Sound than was allowed under existing permits.

Last year, it became obvious that if we did not fix this problem, Connecticut's effort to meet its obligations to its citizens and the environment would be set back by decades.

During the last legislative session, Gov. Rell and the legislature were called on to put the Clean Water Fund back on the short list of top priorities.

Although $110 million in general obligation bonds in each of the next two years is not enough to complete all of the state's clean water projects, it would be a significant influx that could help keep raw sewage from entering our waterways, create high-quality jobs and restore Long Island Sound.

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).

A Previously Unknown Source of Nitrogen in Estuaries, But What Does It All Mean?

Two researchers at the University of Rhode Island have discovered a previously unknown source of nitrogen in Narragansett Bay – the bay’s sediments. They published their work in Nature, which is the big time for peer-reviewed papers, and so I have to believe that their findings are important. I also think their work might have implications for the cleanup of Narragansett Bay and Long Island Sound. But having read a summary, and a newspaper account, and the comments of the researchers, I can’t say for sure, and I wish they had addressed that issue more directly.

I don’t have access to Nature but I’m going to quote from a press release that URI put out, since the scientists presumably approved it and therefore it presumably explains things in a way they consider adequate:

Estuaries have long been considered nitrogen “sinks” or filters, whereby bacteria in the sediments remove substantial quantities of nitrogen through a process called denitrification.

But a new study in Narragansett Bay by researchers at the University of Rhode Island and published this week in the journal Nature has revealed a surprising reversal in the nitrogen cycle. Instead of removing nitrogen, the sediments have become a source of nitrogen through a bacterial process called nitrogen fixation.

According to URI researchers Robinson Fulweiler and Scott Nixon, chlorophyll concentrations in mid-Narragansett Bay appear to have been declining since the 1970s. This has resulted in a decrease in plankton sinking to the bottom. This is an important change because the plankton are an important food source for the benthic community and are essential for the denitrification process.

We know that organic matter affects the rate of denitrification, but no one else has observed a switch from denitrification to nitrogen fixation (production), and no one predicted that the absence of organic matter would lead to nitrogen fixation,” Fulweiler said.

Added Nixon, “Instead of removing some of the nitrogen we put into it, in the summer of 2006 the Bay sediments brought nitrogen into the system. In fact, last summer, the Bay’s sediments added 1.5 times more nitrogen than the direct discharge of sewage.”

You can read the rest yourself, here.

Now here’s my problem. We know that nitrogen from sewage plants is the trigger that starts the hypoxia process in Long Island Sound and presumably in Narragansett Bay too. Or at least that’s what the entire cleanup of Long Island Sound and Narragansett Bay is based on. Here on the Sound, we have a 58.5 percent nitrogen reduction target; Rhode Island’s is 50 percent (more here).

So my question is, if nitrogen is being added through the sediments, and if New York, Connecticut and Rhode Island are spending more than a billion dollars combined to improve sewage treatment plants to remove nitrogen, is it possible we’re wasting our money?

That’s a fairly important public policy question and while it’s nice that Professor Nixon talks about global climate change in the press release, I would have liked to hear his opinion on whether his findings might be applicable to estuaries other than the Bay, and if so what are the implications for our clean-up plans.

I should add, by the way, that while Nixon is a top scientist, I’m not inclined to cut him any slack on non-science issues, solely because he wrote a tepid (to say the least) review of my book back in 2002 or 2003. My recollection is that he thought Bobby Kennedy’s name was too big on the cover and that my writing was melodramatic and that I didn’t provide some of the environmental history that he thought was important. You can read it here (and for balance you can read a review by another scientist, John Waldman, here.)

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.)