Judge OKs $2B deal forcing city to fix sewers
A federal judge on Wednesday signed off on a deal between Houston and federal regulators that will require the city to spend an estimated $2 billion over the next 15 years to upgrade its troubled sanitary sewer system.
Judge Charles Eskridge of the Southern District of Texas approved the consent decree — an agreement negotiated by city and Environmental Protection Agency officials to address the hundreds of sewage overflows around Houston that occur each year — over opposition from local nonprofit Bayou City Waterkeeper.
The environmental advocacy group had sought to focus the agreement more on lowincome communities, where a disproportionate share of the city’s sewer spills occur.
The approval ends a long-running issue for the city dating back to the administration of Turner’s predecessor, Annise Parker. A few years before Turner took office in 2016, EPA officials began negotiating the deal with Parker’s administration instead of suing the city for violating the Clean Water Act through its sewer overflows, which frequently send waste spilling into local streams and bayous.
Under the agreement, the
city will adopt a more aggressive schedule for cleaning and repairing its lift stations, treatment plants and 5,500 miles of sewer pipes. Residents likely will see their water bills rise to help cover the new costs, which are expected to total $2 billion beyond what the city otherwise had planned to spend.
It is not clear when the rate increases will kick in, though residential water rates already have gone up 12.5 percent over the last four years and are scheduled to rise another 1.5 percent next week, when the city’s annual adjustment for inflation and population growth takes effect.
Mayor Sylvester Turner did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has said water bills will remain “well below” 2 percent of the citywide median household income, a threshold set by the EPA to measure affordability, though experts have said the guideline obscures the burden on poor families.
The mayor also has argued water rates would have increased even more under an earlier EPA proposal that would have saddled the city with a far higher bill over a shorter timeline — $5 billion over 10 years.
Kristen Schlemmer, Bayou City Waterkeeper’s legal director, said the nonprofit would “diligently monitor the city’s compliance with the consent decree” and take future legal action if it fails to uphold the agreement.
“This consent decree represents an important first step to giving Houston residents a real solution to the sewage problems we see and smell after every major rain,” Schlemmer said in a statement. “But it falls short in one key respect: It does nothing to help our low-income neighbors fix problems that lead to sewage backing up into their homes, pooling in the yards where their children play, and dirtying our local bayous and creeks.”
A 2016 Houston Chronicle analysis found that two-thirds of the 46 city ZIP codes with aboveaverage rates of sewer overflows also have higher poverty rates and larger concentrations of Hispanic or black residents than the city as a whole.
In court filings, attorneys for the city have said the decree is citywide and will not overlook any area. They argued their plan to prioritize areas with more spills and aging infrastructure means low-income communities “are not being neglected.”
The decree requires the city to repair or replace at least 2.5 percent of Houston’s gravity-driven sewer pipes, or 150 miles, each year. The city totaled less than one-third of that amount in 2019 and 2020, according to Public Works data.
The city also must annually repair or replace at least 5 percent of its roughly 400 lift stations, which Public Works officials rely on to move sewage across Houston’s flat topography in place of the natural gravity flow used in other cities with more elevation changes.
Also included in the decree is a requirement for city workers to proactively clean at least 275 miles of small pipes in areas with known spill problems. The city also will have 10 years to reduce overflows in several areas that see large spills during heavy rains, including sites around Denver Harbor, NRG Stadium, Gulfgate, Alief and the University of Houston-Downtown.
Additionally, the city’s entire sewer system must be inspected every 10 years.
The city also is required to continue its program of educating the public about not pouring oil, fats and grease down the drain. A key cause of spills are temporary blockages, often the result of grease clogs, city data has shown.