Activists, speaking before a series of Pittsburgh City Council budget hearings Tuesday, stepped up calls for the Allegheny County Sanitary Authority to incorporate more “green infrastructure” projects into its plans to comply with federal and state mandates to reduce the amount of untreated sewage that flows into local rivers.
They’ll get no argument from Alcosan executive director Arletta Scott Williams, who is negotiating with the U.S. Department of Justice, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, the state Department of Environmental Protection and the Allegheny County Health Department on extending Alcosan’s time frame and modifying its plan for coming into compliance.
Much of that work will take into account green infrastructure such as permeable paving, rain gardens, rain barrels, tree trenches and green roofs, among others, but how much those efforts can alter the scope of the problem created by old infrastructure that combines sewage and stormwater in the same pipes remains to be seen.
“We can’t do it by 2026,” Ms. Williams said. “We need to extend the schedule. We need to change the parameters. And while we’re going through all of this, that’s when we start to get the outcry for green infrastructure. Which was something we had looked at early on. … Nobody was buying in, so we dropped back to the approach we took.”
That approach, which has come under fire over the past week, contemplates roughly $2 billion worth of so-called gray infrastructure projects such as drop shafts and tunnels to store stormwater before it can be treated at the authority’s wastewater plant, which is also expected to get major upgrades to boost capacity.
“What we don’t want to do is undermine all of the progress that we’ve had in development investment and revitalization by using a plan that’s frankly out of date,” said city Councilwoman Deb Gross, speaking at a rally by the Clean Rivers Campaign, a coalition of groups pushing for greener approaches. “So what I call on Alcosan to do is follow the leadership of the Pittsburgh Water and Sewer Authority and invest in our neighborhoods, invest in better equity and invest in green space.”
Alcosan has already spent about $40 million in its 83 member municipalities on green projects and is launching a $100 million revolving fund to pay for more, said Jeanne Clark, an authority spokeswoman. Federal and state regulators are the main proponents of the big tunnels and shafts that have become a flashpoint, she added.
“We are negotiating to try to put as much green as possible into the system and then be able to back out some of the gray,” she said, adding that the authority helped pay for a study that found 14,000 opportunities for green projects and paid the largest portion of the much-celebrated rain diversion project in Schenley Park. “The people who run the show are the agencies that regulate us.”
Alcosan also is pushing for an “adaptive management” approach with its regulatory agencies that will provide a more flexible framework for coming into compliance, meaning it won’t have to seek an amendment to the consent decree every time the scope of work or time frame changes. And although Mayor Bill Peduto’s chief of staff, Kevin Acklin, last week raised the possibility of the city fighting the gray plan in court, the mayor’s spokesman said Tuesday that the city’s issues are with state and federal regulators, not Alcosan.
All member municipalities, including the city, are conducting “source-reduction” planning, largely involving green projects, that will factor into the final plans.
“I think that anything that can be done to remove flow from the system so it does not have to be managed can change things,” Ms. Williams said. “To what extent, we won’t know until our municipalities, including the city, goes through all of their planning. And we’re looking forward to it. Whatever the concept is that Alcosan is anti-green, that could not be further from the truth. We’re about taking flow out because taking it out means somebody doesn’t have to manage it.”
Robert Zullo: rzullo@post-gazette.com or 412-263-3909. Twitter: @rczullo.
First Published: November 24, 2015, 11:19 p.m.
Updated: November 25, 2015, 3:57 a.m.