Septic Enlightenment
An Open Letter to NYC’s DEP

Back when energy was cheap and only a Nobel laureate could have used carbon and footprint in the same sentence, there was only one good way to process a community’s wastewater. But times, science, and cost factors have changed and with them, so has our understanding of what makes sense. So with that hint here’s Phoenicia’s $17 million dollar question: What looks like a field of grass, has no moving parts to break, requires no energy costs and little maintenance, and does the exact same job, turning wastewater into clean water, as a septic treatment plant… only cheaper and probably better? We know most of you know the answer but hold on, let’s take a quick walk down memory lane first.

Two years ago property owners in Phoenicia rejected the creation of a sewer district based on the construction of a conventional wastewater treatment facility. Factors including personalities & politics played a part in the vote’s outcome but by and large many who voted No believed our small tax base simply couldn’t afford the local contribution to its $370,000 annual operating cost. We at The Phoenicia Times supported that project even though potentially better options like pumping to an underutilized plant in Pine Hill or building a single facility for Boiceville and Phoenicia had been previously removed from consideration by DEP, both without explanation. Another option called constructed wetlands was briefly considered and summarily rejected by the town’s former Wastewater Committee. That left just the conventional plant on the table with its hefty O & M costs, and the property owners didn’t go for it.

People throughout the region were astonished. They thought we must be brain damaged, something in the water maybe, to turn down $17 million in free municipal infrastructure. Never before had this happened, where a watershed community said hey, we don’t know if we can really afford our share of the upkeep. Now we do think most people agree that some form of wastewater treatment would be good for Phoenicia for a number of reasons. Our view as we’ve often explained, is that it’s critical to Phoenicia and Shandaken’s economic future. But we also think people know that the only reason DEP’s willing to fund treatment at all is that that the US EPA has required them to be willing, and so they’ve wisely left the door cracked for new approaches to the problem. We’re grateful they have, and we’re grateful our town board has pushed that door open some by seeking to explore what could be a truly better alternative.

At a packed town hall meeting on Saturday, January 31, many details emerged as engineer Rich Rennia explained the reedbed system he’d designed for the site originally acquired for Phoenicia’s treatment plant. There isn’t, it turns out, any actual rocket science involved at all. It’s basically just mechanical filtration using sand and biological filtration using plants. And while it’s technically experimental since there isn’t an EPA-approved protocol, it’s not as if this is something novel and untried. In Europe where energy costs have always been high, they’ve been building these systems since the 1970’s and they’re well established as the preferred treatment method. Yes, it turns out the system’s plenty big for Phoenicia and its reasonable future growth, and it’s big enough to also solve DEP’s longstanding Chichester effluent problem. No, these constructed wetlands never freeze, they work all winter long even in Vermont and New Hampshire. And as Rennia and his soil scientist Mickey Spokas answered questions about one after another aspect of the system, one concern after another seemed to fall by the way. By meetings end, we think it seemed to most everyone present that this was a system Phoenicia’s property owners might well accept. With its operating costs less than half that of conventional systems and few things to go wrong, the only real dealbreaker it seems, is whether DEP will approve its construction.

Are systems like this the wastewater equivalent of a ten thousand dollar, 100 mile-per-gallon car? We don’t know, but if this one's not, it certainly looks like a Prius. Would they help solve the problem of keeping heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, and other currently unregulated contaminants out of the City’s water supply…something conventional plants can't do at all …and doesn’t DEP need to consider that in a watershed with some of the heaviest mercury precipitation in the country? Well they can do that, and it should be considered. If these systems work they’d obviously save the City tens of millions in capital costs and millions more in annual upkeep throughout the watershed. And they’d also probably ensure that every community here that needs wastewater treatment could afford it. But the only way to know that is to build one and conduct an equivalency test to determine whether constructed wetlands are an acceptable microfiltration technology that can meet the watershed’s tertiary treatment requirements. Everything we've read and every engineer we've talked to thinks they will.

No agency in the world is better able to manage and monitor a pilot project of this type than DEP. If it works as well as conventional microfiltration and EPA approves it, then the City will have raised the bar on future water quality while significantly lowering wastewater treatment costs. This is the kind of leadership we NEED to see from the City; it’s why regulatory agencies exist in the first place. It’s not just to enforce the regs we already have based on old science, but to improve on them, to lower compliance costs when that’s possible, and to raise every standard we can for cost-efficiency and environmental responsibility. Phoenicia’s wastewater treatment is a golden opportunity for DEP to demonstrate its relevance, its vision, and its responsibility under the MOA to make things work here in true partnership with the watershed communities. We hope, we pray they realize what a genuinely important project this could be, and that they review it - and fund it - accordingly.

BP