Clean Water Project making real progress

Rome wasn’t built in a day.

In a recent op-ed titled “Clean water can’t wait any longer,” Alicea Charamut of the Connecticut River Conservancy portrays the MDC’s Clean Water Project as not being done fast enough. She suggests that the district’s proposed Integrated Plan (the management plan of the next phase of the project) will bring progress to a screeching halt.

The Metropolitan District is a public regional institution providing water and sewer services to eight Hartford area municipalities charging only the cost of providing those services, with no profit, and an unpaid board of directors. One of those cities, Hartford, has a sewer system which is over 100 years old. When built, it was state of the art, combining rainwater with sanitary sewage disposal in one system. Every major city on the Connecticut River, including Springfield and Holyoke, Mass., have similar systems.

Over the last hundred years we have learned a lot about the need to contain and treat sanitary sewage. The MDC has agreed to dramatically improve the combined system, improving the level of containment to prevent any spill up to a one-year level of storm. This standard is four times that adopted by Springfield, our nearest combined sewer neighbor to the north.

The notion that the progress will come to a screeching halt is unfounded. Over the past five years the MDC has spent over $750 million to eliminate 550 million gallons of combined sewer and stormwater overflows. Our proposed Integrated Plan would continue to address this issue by spending hundreds of millions of dollars over the next few years, reaching a total spend of over $2.5 billion. This money is being raised by an assessment on the water bills of the MDC member towns, more than doubling the cost of water in the Hartford area.

The Integrated Plan approach, endorsed by the U.S. EPA, takes into account the ratepayer’s ability to pay for their water bill and standard capital improvements to the sewer system in addition to the Clean Water Project charge.

The MDC has to balance needs and costs and does not have the means to continue with infrastructure improvements with no regard to affordability. While it’s true that the MDC is fortunate to have received some grants from the state, the fact remains that even with those grants the enormous cost of the program is causing true financial hardships.

Everyone, including the MDC commissioners, would like to eliminate all discharges to the Connecticut River immediately. This cannot be done. Reduction, repair and elimination of infiltration into the system is not financially feasible in the time frame suggested by Ms. Charmut. We are doing an enormously complex building project, combining separation with hundreds of millions of dollars of plant improvements and a 200-footdeep, four-mile-long, 18-foot in circumference tunnel.

We couldn’t agree more with the author in that it’s not only a Hartford problem. No other wastewater authority in New England has spent nearly as much, or reduced overflows by any amount even close to that accomplished to date by the MDC. There is much to celebrate about this mammoth undertaking. Unrealistic expectations about how quickly it can be done will not lead to a fair, practical, or efficient outcome.