No support for CSO solution

Among the dozens of issues raised at Saturday’s “Third House Session” sponsored by the Jay County Chamber of Commerce, one was of national rather than state concern.
All over America, municipalities are under pressure from the Environmental Protection Agency to eliminate problems caused by antiquated sewer systems that handle both sanitary sewage and storm water. When there is heavy rainfall, the systems are overloaded, and untreated sewage gets dumped into adjoining rivers and streams.
The problem — known to thousands of town and city officials as combined sewer overflows or CSOs — is nothing new. Nor is the EPA’s effort to resolve it.
The Clean Water Act of 1974 took aim at improving wastewater treatment systems all over the country, and that law provided a funding mechanism to help get the job done.
Trouble is, it came up short.
In some cases, such as Portland’s, the most cost effective solution wasn’t to separate sanitary and storm sewers but to build a treatment plant that could handle the combined load. Unfortunately, though it was cost effective, it didn’t completely eliminate the problem.
In others, such as Dunkirk’s, the most cost effective solution was to separate sanitary and storm sewers. But the solution focused just on the city utilities lines, not on the “laterals,” the sewer lines running from a residence to the city sewer. As a result, that approach also fell short of solving the problem.
More than 35 years later, the standards set by the Clean Water Act still remain.
But the funding mechanism doesn’t.
As a result, when a community like Dunkirk or Redkey or Portland tries to satisfy federal standards by eliminating CSOs, it’s doing the job on its own nickel. And who picks up the tab? People paying their higher and higher sewage utility bills.
If you are a mayor or a town council president, it’s enough to make you want to tear your hair out.
And what’s especially frustrating is that, just a couple of years ago when the federal government was trying to figure out how to jump start the economy with public works projects, this longtime environmental challenge was somehow overlooked.
Uncle Sam identified the problem. Uncle Sam put pressure on to solve the problem. But at a key moment when Uncle Sam could have helped, he blinked. — J.R.[[In-content Ad]]