The Narragansett Bay Commission’s $389 million sewer project, which will clean up Narragansett Bay but eventually double sewer rates, may receive state Department of Environmental Management approval within the next 45 days.
”The legal language just needs to be massaged, (and) we should be able to sign an agreement in the next week and a half,” said Angelo Liberti, supervising sanitary engineer for the Office of Water Resources at DEM.
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Once the modification of an existing consent agreement between DEM and the commission is complete, a 30-day public comment period will begin on the intent to approve the project. When the comment period is over, DEM can approve the project.
Already, the commission has begun preliminary design work on phase one of the massive project, a 16,500-foot tunnel that snakes its way from the Fields Point wastewater treatment plant in Providence to the Foundry Building on Promenade Street. The three-phase project is part of a federally mandated effort to bring all of the state’s water bodies up to federal Clean Water Act standards, meaning the waters must be suitable for fishing and swimming.
The “Combined Sewer Overflow” project, as it’s called, will prevent rainwater from washing into the Bay untreated, which now occurs about 70 times per year, forcing DEM at times to close parts of the Bay to swimming and shellfishing.
When the entire project is complete, in about 22 years, untreated sewage from the 10 communities in the Providence area that the commission serves will reach the Bay an average of only four times per year, officials said.
The project was first conceived in 1993 and has been scaled back from its original scope, which would have cost $476 million in 1992 dollars. The $389 million figure was estimated in 1997 dollars, so the actual cost will be greater when construction begins.
Since federal grant programs have dried up, rate payers will foot the bill. Sewer rates, which have not increased since 1994, will double for residential property to about $300 per year by the time the entire project is done.
And commercial and industrial rate payers can also expect similar hikes, said Thomas Brueckner, engineering manager for the commission.
The project is needed because of the nature of the sewer system today. In the 19th Century, when sewer pipes were first planted under city streets, the pipes carried all waste, industrial and storm water, into the Bay untreated. In the early 1900s, when municipalities started treating sewage before discharging it, they installed shafts that carried commercial and residential waste to treatment plants, with any storm water runoff.
When it rains too much, however, the water overflows into the original pipe which discharges directly into the Bay. Because this system is still in place, untreated water still reaches the Bay. The combined sewer overflow project tunnels are designed to capture the overflow of storm water. Once it is caught, it can be treated before it is discharged.
Once DEM approves the project – the 17th version of it that was considered – the commission will begin designing the first 30 percent of it, which it hopes to complete by June. DEM will then approve these plans, clearing the way for the commission to complete the designs, which will take about a year and half, Brueckner said. Then, construction of the ‘phase one’ tunnel from Fields Point to the Foundry can begin.
Once this five-year project is done, a two-year evaluation of the effectiveness of phase one will begin. This complete, the commission will begin work on phases two and three, which call for interceptor channels to be planted eight feet underground along the Woonasquatucket and Seekonk Rivers. These channels will direct overflow storm water to the main tunnel, where the water can be held until it is treated.
Phase three of the project calls for a second tunnel and two more interceptor channels, built in Pawtucket, to carry overflowing water to the Bucklin Point treatment plant in East Providence.
When everything is done, the commission estimates the annual overflow volume will be cut by 98 percent, meaning that portions of the Bay now closed to swimming and fishing may be able to be reopened during dry weather.
But preventing untreated sewage from reaching the Bay comes at a steep price, one that will be borne mostly by low and moderate income rate payers. Seventy percent of the population the commission serves is in Providence, Pawtucket, and Central Falls, said Paul Pinault, executive director of the commission.
And the increased costs will also harm business, especially small businesses that use a great deal of water, predicts Thomas Perkins Jr., a Narragansett Bay Commission commissioner and owner of R.E. Sturdy, a Providence plating company. Perkins, the only commissioner who voted against the sewer overflow project, said the commission should negotiate with the federal Environmental Protection Agency to find a solution that costs less.
”The Bay is getting cleaner and cleaner all the time, and I think we should wait to see how clean it does get before we go out and spend money we can’t afford,” Perkins said.
But the options are limited, Brueckner said. One idea the commission rejected was to build more treatment facilities, rather than tunnels that channel flow to the two existing ones. The city of Atlanta tried this option. But Brueckner noted that the city was sued by an environmental group which claimed the new plants were inadequate. The court agreed. For this and other reasons, he said, this idea was discarded.
”The truth of the matter is that all alternatives that address the Clean Water Act (requirements) are expensive,” he said.
The commission will use the state revolving loan fund, a federally-funded low-interest loan, to pay for the project. Pinault said the revolving loans were initiated during President Reagan’s administration to replace the federal grant programs of the 1970s, which would fund as much as 90 percent of the cost of local sewer projects.
The city of Newport, in fact, is an example of a municipality which had most of the cost of its combined sewer overflow system paid for with these federal grants. Now, the commission, along with the cities of New Bedford and Fall River, Mass. – which are also working on combined sewer overflow projects – are lobbying the federal government to bring these grants back.
