Last week, the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) and the Cities of Somerville and Cambridge held a hastily-scheduled public meeting to provide updates on plans to address combined sewer overflows (CSOs) in the Mystic River, Charles River, and Alewife Brook. Nearly 350 people attended this meeting, including state and local legislators, staff from MyRWA, Charles River Watershed Association, and Save the Alewife Brook, and many of you – concerned community members who want to see poop out of our rivers.
The public’s questions were clear:
How can we possibly allow the continued release of raw sewage at Alewife Brook, impacting people and property?
How are we going to address the releases of sewage into the Mystic, Charles, and the Alewife?
Can we get creative about how these projects are funded?
How can we ensure a greater level of transparency and public participation in this process?
A slide from an in-meeting poll shows that a plurality of respondents were attending a CSO Control Plan public meeting for the first time. Click to expand
By contrast, the presentations from the project teams echoed misguided arguments from a Boston Globe editorial from last year, underplaying the environmental harm of CSOs and emphasizing the costs and disruptions of solutions.
MyRWA stands with the public. CSOs are a significant public health risk, an environmental justice tragedy, and a consequential barrier to thriving rivers with healthy ecosystems and opportunities for safe and sustainable recreation. To fail to rise to this occasion would mean forever leaving this last chapter in the cleanup of Boston Harbor unfinished.
“This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to decide together--democratically--how to shape infrastructure in a way that will benefit people for the next 75 to 100 years,” said Patrick Herron, Executive Director for the Mystic River Watershed Association in his public comments. “We propose that we reframe this conversation…not as a question of who has to do what, or who can force which entity to do how much, but rather as an opportunity: How can we reimagine an infrastructure…that will enhance the lives of the people who love these rivers, that is resilient to climate change, and that does its best to protect public health.”
Thanks to your advocacy last fall, the state intervened and told the project teams to push pause on their initial plans, plans which would have short-changed our rivers and guaranteed the ongoing release of sewage. Since then, they have been granted a 120-day extension to submit a new plan, though we expect news of their “preferred alternatives” to come much sooner. The fight isn’t over, and we hope that you will stay engaged with us as things move forward. You can access full meeting material – including slides, public comments, and a recording – on the project website.
If you weren’t able to make it to last week’s meeting, or are still making sense of the information presented, we wanted to share our three biggest takeaways:
Alewife Brook remains the site of the most severe CSO impacts
The Alewife is the recipient of the highest volume of raw, untreated sewage of all rivers and streams in all of Greater Boston and the only place where big storms send significant amounts of sewage-laden water into parks, paths, and homes. CSOs have an acute impact in all three water bodies, but that impact is most intense at Alewife Brook. And that pollution travels directly to the Mystic River.
Even the most extreme potential costs are not budget-breaking
At long last, the MWRA has presented more information about potential costs to ratepayers. It can be difficult to understand the difference that a $500 million plan might have on the average person’s pocketbook compared to a $4 billion plan over 30-50 years. In the data presented, even the most expensive plans would amount to only about a 10% increase above average base MWRA rates – the cost of an extra lunch out every month. And this rate change would be rolled out slowly, over decades.
Rising costs are a top concern for everyone who lives in and around Boston, but the scale of the impact of even the most ambitious plans, once distributed across the hundreds of thousands of households in MWRA’s service area and over the course of many years, will be worth it, especially if additional state support can reduce that impact and help ensure it is distributed equitably.
In the Mystic specifically, the cost difference between the least ambitious plan and the most ambitious one is modest.
There’s room for more state support
Large infrastructure projects like this are expensive, but Greater Boston is no stranger to large projects. The cost of the MassDOT’s Allston/I-90 megaproject is estimated at around $2 billion, and the Town of Lexington just approved a $660 million new high school.
Several people—including Representative Mike Connolly—called for seeing this as an important regional problem, worthy of state-level investment.
CSO control will provide regional benefits that extend far beyond Cambridge and Somerville. Costs do not need to be borne exclusively by ratepayers. The state should supplement the cost of CSO elimination.
An early slide in the presentation asserts that eliminating CSOs alone will not achieve swimmable, fishable rivers. This is the wrong way to represent what is at stake. Instead, we propose that without eliminating CSOs, we can never have swimmable, fishable rivers here in Boston.
We have come so far. It’s time to finish the job.
As we wrote in our letter to the editor in response to the Globe editorial, “The headline that appeared over your editorial online asks: ‘Is making the Charles [and Mystic and Alewife] swimmable worth the cost?’ For our part, the question is: ‘Is freeing our rivers from sewage worth the cost?’ Our answer remains a resounding yes.”
The MWRA Board will convene again on February 4th. Now is a great time to send another letter expressing your concern about CSOs, and to prompt your state legislators and local city/town councils or select boards to do the same. Instructions and email templates can be found at our website, www.mysticriver.org/csos.
