"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.

Westchester County Argues That The Sound Cleanup is Too Expensive

Westchester County has finally said publicly what its officials have known for a long time – that it will take a hell of a lot of money to meet the Long Island Sound cleanup’s nitrogen reduction goals at its two biggest sewage treatment plants, in Mamaroneck in New Rochelle. In fact, they seem to be saying that the benefit is not worth the cost:

“We are all for protecting Long Island Sound, but you’ve got to balance that over what people can afford to pay,” he said.

The cost estimate, according to yesterday’s New York Times, runs from $355 million to $573 million, which is almost as much as one of the original estimates for doing nitrogen removal at every sewage treatment plant on the Sound in New York.

The estimate has county officials making a number of different arguments, all of which are worth considering and all of which provoke strong disagreements.

1. Westchester County argues that New York State should allow a nitrogen trading program similar to the one Connecticut uses. If it did, county taxpayers would be spared the huge sewage plant improvement bill.

2. It points out that the cost has to be paid by the people who live in the sewer districts that empty into the Sound, rather than by all county residents, and so therefore the per household cost is going to be high.

3. It argues that in any case, Westchester’s contribution to the Sound’s problem is so miniscule that it makes no sense to require the county to meet the overall goal of reducing nitrogen by 58.5 percent by 2014.

On point 1, Bryan Brown, one of Sphere’s regular readers, noted here a few weeks ago that nitrogen trading only works if there’s someone to trade with. In Westchester’s case, the county would need a trading partner that has reduced nitrogen beyond its 58.5 percent goal and who would then be able to sell the credits to Westchester. The Times found some experts who agree:

In the five years trading has been conducted in Connecticut, baseline discharges of nitrogen have been reduced to 34,000 pounds a day, from 50,000 pounds a day, with the goal being 18,000,500 pounds by 2014. State officials estimate that the trading program – the largest of its kind in the nation, according to Mr. Grumbles of the E.P.A. – will save $200 million to $400 million, and that the total cost of reducing the state’s nitrogen discharge may ultimately be more than $800 million.

Environmental officials in New York say that carrying out a trading program among the 23 waste-water treatment plants throughout the state involved in the agreement with the E.P.A. would be much more difficult than in Connecticut, particularly for Westchester, which is the second-largest contributor to the problem, after New York City. It would be hard for the county to find other municipalities to trade with.

“There is not a supplier of nitrogen credits in this basin that could satisfy the requirements that Westchester has to satisfy,” said James DeZolt, assistant director in the State Division of Water.

On point 2 – the question of whether the costs should be borne only by those in the sewer districts or by all county residents – officials are wary because it’s politically risky. The sewer districts cover heavily-populated areas – New Rochelle, Mamaroneck, parts of White Plains and Scarsdale, Harrison, Port Chester and other towns – and presumably people who live there would be happy to share the costs. The other presumption, however, is that people who don’t live there would balk. And of course, if you’re going to ask Yonkers residents to pay for fixing the sewage plant in New Rochelle, at some point you’ll also be asking New Rochelle residents to fix the sewage plant in Yonkers. And there are also large, less-populated areas of the county where people do not live in a sewer district at all and so pay no sewer taxes.

I’m one of those people, and my opinion is that I’d like to know more about what the costs might be. Obviously I’m a proponent of cleaning up Long Island Sound. I also think that all of Westchester benefits if the Sound is clean, which might be an argument worth making if you’re trying to persuade people outside the Sound’s sewer districts to share the cost. But it’s hard to do that without some idea of what that cost will be. I could deal with a $50 or $100 a year property tax increase to pay for the Sound cleanup. But if it’s $3,000 a year, I’d have to think harder about it.

As for point 3 – that the county’s contribution to the Sound is negligible – I reject it completely. An argument could have been made 10 years ago that it was unfair to require every sewage treatment plant on the Sound to reduce nitrogen by the same amount. Hypoxia – the environmental condition that nitrogen reduction is trying to correct – is limited to the western half or third of the Sound and is worse off Westchester, Fairfield and Nassau counties.

Obviously the New London sewage plant, 90 miles away, was not playing as important a role in causing hypoxia as the big plants in Queens, the Bronx, Westchester and Nassau, etc. But for political reasons, those overseeing the Sound cleanup thought it would be more acceptable is all the communities were required to do the same amount of nitrogen reduction.

Westchester agreed. As a result, New London and Groton and other cities in eastern Connecticut are all doing their part in solving a problem that’s particularly bad off Westchester. But now that Westchester knows what the costs are, it wants a do-over.

Mr. Schwartz argued that the county’s four treatment plants contributed less than 1 percent of all nitrogen discharged from the Long Island Sound Watershed and that it made no sense for them to have to reduce their nitrogen emissions by at least 58.5 percent.

Here’s what state and county officials say in response:

State officials counter that although Westchester’s contribution may be only 1 or 2 percent, its plants are closest to areas of high concentrations of hypoxia, and some areas most affected are along the shoreline.

Mr. DeZolt said that while plants in other parts of the state, including in New York City, had taken steps to reduce their nitrogen output, Westchester was still in the planning stages.

Mr. Grumbles said trading might not always be the best way to reduce pollution.

“It depends on the conditions and different types of entities that are there,” he said. “We’re not trying to force trading on to any particular area.”

Paul E. Stacey, director of planning and standards for the Connecticut Bureau of Water Protection, said it might be difficult to duplicate the state’s trading program elsewhere.

“In a lot of ways, we had an ideal situation,” he said. “Four facilities might make it more difficult to trade. You really need the market, and we have plants of different sizes. We were lucky.”

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.