Storm Water and North Bay
On Monday night, the resolution declaring the City's sewer separation project a Type II Action, requiring no environmental review, came before the Common Council at its informal meeting. After the resolution was introduced and seconded, the discussion began with a presentation by two people from Delaware Engineering, the consulting firm involved with the upgrade to the City's waste water treatment plant and, it would seem, with this project as well. During the presentation, the antiquity of Hudson's sewer system was stressed (it was mentioned more than once that much of it dates back to 1830), and the need to do the work was linked to "sinkhole issues." Our aged sewer system is collapsing and must be replaced, and, it was explained, the law requires that our old sewer, which is a combined sewer, must be replaced with new mains that will handle sewage and storm water separately.
The presenters also spoke of the antidegradation policies in the Clean Water Act. "You cannot discharge water that will cause the quality of a water body to decline" and "You must remove everything that could damage the river" were two statements that were made. Yet when asked how, given these antidegradation policies, storm water runoff, which contains salts, oils, trash, sediments, and other pollutants that damage the river, can be discharged untreated into North Bay, the answer was that "the focus is on sanitary sewer not on storm water."
Reference was also made to Hudson's "robust street cleaning program," which was meant to reassure us that the storm water flowing over our streets, which would be discharged into North Bay, wasn't all that polluted. Those of us who live in Hudson and regularly walk its streets know that our street cleaning program doesn't seem robust enough to eliminate oil spilled in alleys or to address all the litter dumped on streets and in gutters.
Maybe everything will be fine. Maybe discharging storm water into North Bay will have no negative effect on the ecosystem of the bay or of the river, where it will ultimately end up, but without environmental review, no one knows that. It is hard to understand why there is such apparent urgency to declare this project a Type II Action and forgo all environmental scrutiny. There may be a case to be made for the urgency, but it is not one that has been persuasively made with the public.
COPYRIGHT 2015 CAROLE OSTERINK
It seems the goal is to eliminate raw sewage overflow into the river during storms, which is good. The downside is that street runoff is polluted too and not good if diverted untreated straight into the river. Best would be to treat both, but how to accomplish this without building another treatment plant? The best solution would be a gated system. If there is a really big storm and the sewage plant is in danger of overflowing sewage into the river, alarms go off, gates close and the storm water bypasses the plant and goes into the river. Thus storm water is treated most of the time and only diverted during a large storm event. The large amount of rain would dilute any pollutants mixed in and it would not be so bad for the river. Sounds simple, but it might require quite a bit more in terms of engineering.
ReplyDeleteThere are a wide variety of easier methods, but the point of the current discussion is that no one's ideas will be considered at all.
DeleteThe goal of an environmental review is to have the public participate in a discussion of reasonable alternatives. The city is desperate to prevent that from happening.
But when we win this point, and get our review, please bring this idea to everyone. All reasonable ideas must be considered during a review. That is the law according to SEQRA, the enforcement of which is the responsibility of the public alone.
1.
ReplyDeleteAll of this is ultimately driven by one federal policy, with enforceable rules, which calls for a specific program meant to operate at the local level.
National CSO Policy:
"Public Participation In developing its long-term CSO control plan: the permittee will employ a public participation process that actively involves the affected public in the decision-making to select the long-term CSO controls. ..." (CSO Policy II. C(2), Federal Register, Vol. 59, no. 75; April 1994, p. 18692).
In Hudson, public participation has been discarded for the second driving force behind the city's immediate plans: $600,000.
The money explains the presence on Monday of the engineers - both of whom provided us with an infomercial - and also the city's growing desperation, evidenced by the new reason the project is supposed to be exempt from environmental review.
This means: exempt from public participation; exempt from hearing protests that there are two projects being discussed, not one; exempt from a consideration of reasonable alternatives; exempt from weighing the lesser of evils, such as the "handful" of overflows each year (Perry) compared to the calculable hundreds of millions gallons of unfiltered runoff which will be diverted directly into the bay.
Under the new rationale, however, the planners will discover that the project is not exempt from considering those negative "thresholds" which necessitate an environmental review. There are so many of these - and the city certainly knows this - that the new Resolution has a faint odor of desperation.
2.
ReplyDeleteIncidentally, here's the entire history of public participation in the City of Hudson's CSO program going back to its beginnings in the mid-1970s:
1. February 2009 - The sole public participation meeting for Long Term Control Plan (see above); estimated time 1/2 hour. Meeting Minutes reflect none of the items listed on the Agenda.
2. October 2009 - Public outreach meeting to update public on construction proposal for the Waste Water Treatment Plant.
3. May 2014 - Public Hearing on CDBG Program application for sewer project; a brief question-and-answer on June 13 preceding the council's unanimous support of the grant application for the plan.
4. March 2015 - Informal Meeting of the Common Council to introduce a new Resolution on SEQR status of sewer project with an entirely new SEQR rationale.
Everyone present at the Informal Meeting experienced a particularly visceral moment when Alderman Garriga received the brunt of the official attitude about this project. The alderman had asked a question of the engineers-who-were-selling-something, and she inadvertently used the word "wastewater" for "stormwater." Technically, she was not incorrect, and I wasn't the only one who knew what she was trying to say.
But what every spokesman for this project took her to mean was "sanitary waste," and the outcry from every quarter that she was WRONG was led by the engineers themselves.
Fortunately the public came to her defense, but why was it our job to put the engineers and the city back on their heels? How dare those salesmen-engineers come here and condescend in that way when they were wrong.
Someone might have asked the alderman, "what do you mean by 'stormwater'?" Instead, they jumped to a conclusion and attempted to put her in her place. This place is too overly aggressive.
It was also pretty evident that the City's Corporate Counsel is now running the whole show, giving long and incorrect explanations about subjects he admitted he has no expertise in.
For the millionth time in this city, it was obvious that the public may speak as a formality only, and never as any kind of serious pursuit of useful information and advice.
Now more than ever, for the sake of the North Bay, must remind them that they work for us and not the other way around.
Oops, I mean to write:
Delete"Someone might have asked the alderman, "what do you mean by 'wastewater'?"
The city's brand new SEQR rationale claims that "the project ... does not meet or exceed any Type I thresholds in Part 617."
ReplyDeleteWell they didn't look hard enough, and it almost seems like they didn't look at all!
Just take a simple example from Part 617.4, which is the list of "thresholds" that would disqualify the sewer project from being SEQRA-exempt. That is the same list of thresholds the engineer read aloud after Alderman Friedman's question (that is, when the same engineer wasn't skipping over the important parts).
"[A] project or action that involves the physical alteration of 10 acres."
You wouldn't know it without doing the research - which the city obviously hasn't done - but the definition of "10 acres" here equals anything between 9.9 acres down to "0.1-acre."
Read it for yourself in the state's "SEQR Handbook," p. 27: http://www.dec.ny.gov/docs/permits_ej_operations_pdf/seqrhandbook.pdf
This is only one of the triggers the city missed at 617.4.
After reaching a threshold, the reader is next directed to "Criteria for Determining Significance," at 617.7(c)(ii). When you take a look at the criteria, does anyone suppose that the North Bay can evade an environmental review after reading the following:
"[T]he removal or destruction of large quantities of vegetation or fauna; substantial interference with the movement of any resident or migratory fish or wildlife species; impacts on a significant habitat area; substantial adverse impacts on a threatened or endangered species of animal or plant, or the habitat of such a species; or other significant adverse impacts to natural resources" (§617.4(b)(6)(i)).
"sinkhole issues?" Five years (and five million dollars) ago, there were no sink holes. These brilliant engineers moved the plant's relief valve from Dock uphill to State .
ReplyDeleteThey should be sued for malpractice. Their design "fix" has undermined Front Street.