Fees for cleaner water

Chattanooga homeowners and businesses may be piqued by the city's sharply higher storm-water control fees, but city officials have no option if they are to bring water quality standards for our streams, aquifers and river up to the mandated state and federal EPA standards.

The problem is not with the standards. Rather, it lies with the city for not acting more aggressively over the past few years to meet the standards and to educate residents about the requirements and how to help meet them.

Water quality in the city, county and across the state has lagged national environmental standards for years. Public officials at the local and state level simply have not taken water quality standards relating to non-point source pollution seriously enough to energize control efforts or to educate the public about each citizens' personal responsibility for the problem. In fact, they traditionally have seemed to view such standards, both for water and air pollution, as a nuisance and have worked mainly just to meet the most minimal level of compliance.

City faces hefty fine

Now that the EPA and the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) are preparing to levy a heft fine against the city next year for non-compliance with water quality standards, the issue can no longer be avoided. The amount of the fine and the city's ability to continue economic development activities that add to water pollution hang in the balance. The city must act. And the new fees must be collected to finance a more strenuous water quality effort.

Residents and business owners alike must each pay a share to remedy their separate contributions to the problem. For many businesses, construction of retention ponds, absorption plantings and general run-off control may cost thousands of dollars.

Public creates the problem

Trouble is, relatively few residents and business owners understand precisely how they contribute to the degradation of water quality, and the extent of it. That's partly the city's fault, yet it's wholly the city's responsibility to correct.

Homeowners will essentially have to pay for the city's work to collect, separate and treat the water, lawn chemicals and oil slicks that run off their houses, yards and driveways into the city's storm-water gullies, ditches, drains and pipes, and that infiltrate the sanitary sewer system. The city's fee for that will rise from $36 a year to $115.20 a year to control the flow of such water into streams, wetlands, the river and the sewage treatment plant.

Similarly, the city must require businesses to control their storm-water run-off and charge them for their contribution to the storm-water load, based on the square-footage surface areas of their buildings and parking lots. Businesses may apply for significant credits against their storm-water fees for the cost of their own containment efforts, such as the construction of retention ponds and other collection systems.

None of the standards are new. They originate in the state's 1971 Water Quality Control Act, the 1972 federal Clean Water Act, and the subsequent regulations that have been implemented to meet the standards in phases over the past decades. The city, for example, began restricting industrial water pollution and improving its sanitary sewage system with the receipt decades ago of a $100 million grant to help build the Moccasin Bend sewage treatment and collection infrastructure.

Phase I and Phase II standards issued for metropolitan communities of 100,000 or more in population were put in place in the 1990s. TDEC inspections for storm-water runoff began in 2002. TDEC filed a notice of violation against the city in 2003 and negotiated a consent order in May 2005. The city has been under review since then. The latest non-compliance finding, and the pending fine, spring from that history.

It would be unfair to blame the state or the standards for the cost of compliance to clean up water pollution sources. All the water in our watershed ultimately goes into the river or into the aquifers that supply our wells, including the wells used here by major utility districts to supply customers.

A wide level of pollution

All that water must be treated to eliminate pollutants that the public generates through lawn chemicals, oil slicks, industrial and construction run-off, septic tanks and sewage systems. Whether residents live on our mountaintops, farms or deep in land-locked subdivisions, water run-off ultimately flows into the river or our aquifers.

Every major creek in the town Signal Mountain, for example, has been found to contain e-coli bacteria from the leaky septic tanks that drain out from the mountain's rock shelf. Those creeks, also laden with lawn fertilizer chemicals and other non-point source pollution, all drain directly to the Tennessee River. Hence the moratorium on new construction in Signal Mountain and the state's clean-up demands.

The river, in turn, carries a pollution and nutrient load that chokes off oxygen, harms aquatic life, presents a risk of infection to swimmers, and costs excessive amounts to purify for drinking water.

The city's clean-up plan

The clean-up bill is substantial. The city's new fee structure is expected to generate $22 million annually, which will be used to survey or inspect all water pollution sources, collection systems and water ways, and to develop and implement improved containment and maintenance systems. Stream restoration and property purchases for stream buffer systems also will be financed from water quality user-fees.

Ways may well be discovered to tweak the city's storm-water containment system or to make the fee structure more equitable. But residents and business owners here are not alone in dealing with storm-water pollution and degraded water quality. Many cities plan to collect and spend far more than Chattanooga. Ultimately, we all will benefit from having cleaner and healthier water.