Let's talk about sewage. If you want to be a sustainable city, you must be willing to talk about sewage.
A number of angry letters appear every year in the newspapers of communities downstream of Grand Rapids pleading with the city to do something about the sewage it releases into the Grand River.
Communities along the Grand should stop dumping sewage into the Grand – if not immediately, then as soon as they possibly can. And that goes for rural communities and suburban septic tanks as well.
But too many of the letter writers are unaware of what Grand Rapids has already done to achieve that end. They seem oblivious of the fact that Grand Rapids has – very deliberately and at great expense – eliminated more than 99.74 percent of its historic sewage discharges in the last 20 years. Enormous sacrifices have been made.
Let’s look at the numbers.
Throwing Money at the Problem
Fifty million is a pretty big number. Fifty million is the number of gallons of sewage that Grand Rapids poured into the Grand River last year. If the city hadn’t released it, the mess would have backed up into people’s basements where, trust me, it would have looked like a bigger number than you or I can imagine. But no disagreement: 50 million gallons of sewage is ample reason to feel impatient at the pace of cleanup.
210 million is also a big number. 210 million is the number of dollars that the City of Grand Rapids has spent on sewer upgrades since the 1980’s. That expenditure has reduced the total volume of untreated sewage discharged annually into the Grand by 99.74 percent.
260 million is the number of dollars that the city will spend by 2019, the deadline to eliminate the remaining 26 hundredths of a percent of sewage overflow. The year 2019 is specified in an agreement between the Grand Rapids and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality as the year by which the city will address the remaining 7 of its original 59 sewer overflow sites.
At that point, the sanitary sewer and the storm sewer systems serving Grand Rapids will be two different and disconnected entities, and the sewage overflow problem will no longer exist. Human sewage and storm water runoff once traveled through the same pipes, regularly exceeding the system's capacity, and thus spilling out into the river.
Unfortunately, the solution to sewage discharges exacerbates another, entirely different pollution problem: the stormwater pollution problem. And that is the biggest water pollution problem Grand Rapids faces today.
A More Sophisticated Approach
If you are a municipal environmental protection authority, and your objective is to get sewage out of the river, there are a couple of strategies you can choose from. The first strategy is to spend the remaining $50 million according to the schedule agreed upon with the MDEQ. That gets the job done by 2019.
The other strategy is to use some of that money to find ways of reducing the stormwater that enters the system, such as building green rain gardens on grey parking lots to absorb the rains. Less storm water entering the system means fewer, smaller overflows. So you get a cleaner river next year, and a progressively cleaner waterway in the years after that.
Grand Rapids has asked the MDEQ to revise its agreement in a way that allows more money to be targeted at controlling storm water. The request, if granted, likely would mean delaying the original separation deadline beyond 2019. Is this a good idea? 'No' is most peoples first instinct. The Holland Sentinel, for example, urged Grand Rapids not to delay the sewer separation beyond its target date in an opinion piece last month.
I sense that much of the current dispute centers on a misapprehension: that Grand Rapidians are asking to be let off the hook at the water’s expense. Reopening these sorts of complicated regulatory negotiations always raises peoples’ suspicions, and that is easy enough to understand.
But older cities all over the state, and in fact over much of the country, are facing the same problems with sewer systems that Grand Rapids is confronting. Most of them have yet to face reality. Most of them are not prepared to spend what has been spent here much less do voluntarily what has been done here. The City of Grand Rapids is a leader, not a laggard, when it comes to correcting the mistakes of the past and promoting sustainable use of the Grand River.
By reopening negotiations with the MDEQ, Grand Rapids is on track to spend limited taxpayer dollars more responsibly and actually accelerate the cleanup of the Grand River. The city should look past the critics, and negotiate the best deal it can with the state to get the cleanest river it can.
No other community in the state of Michigan has worked as hard, or spent as much, as Grand Rapids to clean up its river. Nowhere has there been more accountability. Few places anywhere have accomplished as much in so short a time.
That kind of performance deserves a measure of cautious support and watchful confidence from Grand River communities upstream and down.
Photos:
Grand Rapids Environmental Services Wastewater Plant in morning fog
Two sections of the Grand River just downstream from where sewage is discharged into the river
Photographs by Brian Kelly - All Rights Reserved
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