I know this series of comments and the original posting have been about ways we can help the sewer district deal with the massive problem we face with sewerage and water quality, but as we organize to lend a hand, here is a crack where the light gets in on what's happening that is not community education:

Trustee rips sewer district spending

Friday, March 16, 2007

Michael Scott

Plain Dealer Reporter

The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District has overspent by $18 million on construction contracts over the last seven years, one of its trustees said Thursday.

That overage doesn't even include a 1999 project that was supposed to be $300,000, but eventually cost $1.15 million - an increase of 285 percent.

Outspoken Trustee Gary Starr, mayor of Middleburg Heights, used those cost-overrun figures to continue his ongoing crusade for financial reform at the district, which recently approved a five-year, 50 percent rate increase for its 330,000 customers in Cleveland and 59 other communities.

"After looking at this for only the last six months, I'm angry," said Starr, a longtime sewer district trustee. "I've become passionate about it because I believe we need to change the way we spend our money and we've had some contracts go way, way over."

Sewer district figures released at the trustees' semimonthly meeting confirmed Starr's charges, but district officials interpreted the numbers differently.

Executive Director Erwin Odeal said cost overruns, referred to as contract "change orders" by the district, usually average out over time.

"Some jobs come in high, some come in low and we bring every change order before this board for approval," Odeal said. "I think we've done a credible job managing costs."

District officials released a report Thursday showing that total project cost overruns in the last 23 years averaged 3.5 percent - from a high of 14 percent over in 2003 to a low of 4 percent below cost estimates in 1996.

The $18 million that Starr referred to represents cost overruns of 6.6 percent during the last seven years, records show.

Still, Starr said, cost overruns on specific jobs within that average - particularly in recent years - have been unacceptably high.

"What is our standard? Is it 5 percent over? Maybe 10 percent over?" he asked, suggesting to district officials that the industry standard for every job should be about 7 percent.

Uh... I guess they have some internal work to do on the spending and accounting side. I believe that we will need work on the sewer infrastructure, but maybe discussion of how homeowners and businesses can help will have its day sooner than later.

Martha and I talked to Watterson and his law director Fran DiDonato. He said he plans to discuss downspout disconnects in a PD interview with John Kuehner on the water department that should be out in April. Stay tuned... We gave him a document that outlines incentives for reductions in sewerage rates for disconnecting and I thought that that might have to wait, but hey... maybe now is a good time for us to forward that to the NEORSD. We might need incentives to lend a hand if this is how the business is working there.

Remember the Talking Heads lyric from Once In A Lifetime "water flowing underground... same as it ever was"? Well, this is apparently money flowing underground -- same as it ever was.

I am only speculating here, but I think it is the "away" concept that launched the idea that whatever we don't want to deal with, we can send "away". The idea that it can be tossed, flushed, drained, trucked, buried, etc. is a reaction to garbage and sewage accumulating as urban centers evolved. Look at all the disinfectants we have manufactured to deal with our fear of bacteria. (And I would comment that with the number of unknown chemicals we consume through our lungs, skin and stomach linings, these may truly be worrisome to our compromised immune systems.)

But we grew up with this idea of sending things "away". Let some poor sod deal with my mess. We put our leaves on the tree lawn to go away. We place our garbage on the curb and it is taken away. We bury nuclear waste; we let tons of nitrate rich fertilizer wash "away" from our lawns, farm fields and CAFO waste lagoons. There is the persevering idea that we can actually get away from all this stuff.

But as we are learning, unless we decide that the Moon or Mars are appropriate dump sites and dumping there becomes economical, we are forced to live in a cycle of food and waste. We are living in an ecosystem which is a complex methodology, designed by nature for reusing and recycling -- for producing and consuming waste. Everything's coming up roses, but also everything's pushing up daisies.
 
It may be easier to walk on a sidewalk, but water can't get through it, so the water runs faster atop the impermeable pavement into a pipe that carries it to a waterway. This rushing water carries with it whatever soluble or insoluble material it may pick up along the way along a paved area, into a pipe and onto a treatment facility bypassing nature's own well designed filter -- soil. Much of this water needs to be treated, but much of it does not. The soil would be an economical filter for lots of rain water, but it can't get there because we want it to flow "away".

Aqueducts for channeling water go back a long way in history, but sometimes the systems have backfired.

Such as for the Sumerians:

"The early Sumerian civilization of the fourth millennium BC was remarkable, advancing far beyond any that had existed before. Its irrigation system, based on sophisticated engineering concepts, created a highly productive agriculture, one that enabled farmers to produce a surplus of food that supported the formation of the first cities. Managing the irrigation system required a complex social organization, one that may have been more sophisticated than any that had gone before. The Sumerians had the first cities and the first written language, the cuneiform script. They were probably as excited about it as we are today about the Internet.

It was an extraordinary civilization, but there was an environmental flaw in the design of the irrigation system, one that would eventually undermine its agricultural economy. Water from behind dams was diverted onto the land, raising crop yields. Some of the water was used by the crops, some evaporated into the atmosphere, and some percolated downward. Over time, this percolation slowly raised the water table until eventually it approached the surface of the land. When it reached a few feet from the surface it began to restrict the growth of deep-rooted crops. Somewhat later, as the water climbed to within inches of the surface, it began to evaporate into the atmosphere. As this happened, the salt in the water was left behind. Over time, the accumulation of salt reduced the productivity of the land. The environmental flaw was that there was no provision for draining the water that percolated downward.

The initial response of the Sumerians to declining wheat yields was to shift to barley, a more salt-tolerant plant. But eventually the yields of barley also declined. The resultant shrinkage of the food supply undermined the economic foundation of this great civilization."

    from Lester Brown's Eco-Economy

This doesn't seem to be the issue in Northeast Ohio or North American for that matter. Whereas the Sumerians relied on the water cycle of evaporation and rainfall to return water to the Persian Gulf overfilling their water table, we seem to have reduced our water table. Why you might wonder (and I do too) does Portage county need to buy Lake Erie water? Can't they access the aquifer? Are their wells over pumped with the new faster more amazing pumping technology?

Why is one of the most productive estuaries in North America being denied water to support the largest number of species in one area in the western hemisphere? (I am talking about the Apalachicola River Watershed in North Florida.) Because people in Atlanta and rural Georgia and Alabama have diverted the river's flow for drinking, toilet flushing, recreation making (which drives up property values), lawn watering, agriculture and hydroelectric power.

I haven't asked any direct questions of city managers because the response I get from most folks is "I'll flood my basement or my neighbor's basement". I am trying to gather the intelligence to make a strong or irrefutable case for first suburbs to change their codes and encourage their citizenry to take these simple steps while in their yards and gardens this summer.

So development and sprawl are the culprits. As my mother would say, “we got too big for our britches”. But short of lying down in front of a bulldozer, what can we do? Maybe we can change the building codes and let more water percolate into the ground. Maybe we can harvest the rain that falls on our roofs and use it on our gardens. I am with you on the harvesting and gardening Bill, now we just need to see our actions spread.

I must be a magnet for this information because looking for something else I stumbled on this article from Boston.com. Apparently in Boston, they are concerned about Great Lakes water quality. Now we can add toilet lake to the long list of monikers for our region along with rustbelt, gloombelt, poorest city, industrial wasteland, etc.

From the article:
"Even though municipalities in the Great Lakes region have spent vast sums of money in recent decades upgrading their wastewater plants, the situation remains appalling, says the report by the Sierra Legal Defense Fund.

The report makes several recommendations, including improving water conservation in order to reduce the flow to sewage plants, and keeping rain water out of sewers by disconnecting downspouts and separating storm drains and sewer systems."

From the report card: (read about it at Sierra Legal Defense Fund)
"The results are disappointing, with cities like Toronto, Syracuse and Hamilton getting below average grades. Detroit, Cleveland and Windsor performed abysmally and are at the bottom of the class. The cities that fared poorly typically have serious problems related to their combined sewers; antiquated systems that combine storm water and sanitary sewers into a single pipe and are prone to releasing raw sewage during wet weather."

This CSO outfall (#14) is in Akron, but there are many in Cleveland and throughout the region. It is more difficult to find one in action, but you can imagine what rushes from them in a rain event.

Slight depression, not in a clear drainage topography, less than an acre, even less than 1/4 acre, which accummulates percipitation - particularly in spring, but will be dry in summer.  Frogs and their tadpoles prefer them because they are temporal and thus have few in water predators.  Often in glaciated terrain, but anywhere riverbeds have shifted, organics have settled.

Norm,

I will be directing a portion of the stormwater discharge away from the foundation of the house (which has no basement, because you hit the very solid Berea Sandstone bedrock just 18" below ground level). 

I don't know if Cleveland Hts. wants a permit for this, but I do plan to have the rain barrel(s) inside a raised planter, so they will be out of sight, and therefore not "unsightly".

Jeff offered a good definition of a vernal pond.  I have a low spot in the back part of the yard, and I need some good soil for the raised planters........

So the game plan is to build the planters, install the rain barrel(s) and drain pipes, add dirt from the low spot in the yard, blend and pour into a martini glass over crushed ice.

If time and mood permits, I might add a couple more barrels to the pond as an overflowing/cascading barrel waterfall with a solar powered pump, but first things first... There is always next year :-)

I thought potable was a stretch for our treatment capacity. (The guy worked for NEORSD.) I appreciate the TMDL info.
Ryan Homes, eh? Are they required to connect to a storm sewer? I would guess that storm and sanitary are separate there...
If you have any thoughts on all this water sewer stuff for the basic rate payer, tax payer, please share more.

This 1998 study by the Natural Resources Defense Council has some interesting findings:

Another Cost of Sprawl
The Effects of Land Use on Wastewater Utility Costs

"The analysis also shows, however, that Cleveland's geographic zone-based user rates do not attempt to recover-nor do they inadvertently recover-the differences in costs attributable to different land use patterns. Because these differences can be substantial, as the first part of the study revealed, it is likely that customers in denser neighborhoods (both city and suburban) within the Cleveland water service area are continuing to subsidize those customers living in less dense areas. This rate structure may also translate into a subsidy of higher income customers because lower income households tend to live in older, higher density areas."

Wow, the federal money for air quality was pumped into traffic signal synchronization; purportedly it would cut down on emissions of idling vehicles, but combined with new emission standards which cut emissions, it has served mainly to allow people to move farther out with the same or similar commute times. And now we find that the poor people who live in the city of Cleveland and its more densely populated inner ring suburbs subsidize the water for the outlying exurbs. Is anyone reading the studies here or do we just like to study and shelve? Maybe it is time to reread some of the studies that have been done and rethink the regionalism discussion with these findings...

From Today's PeeDee on regionalism...
"Cuyahoga County commissioners:

They are too busy to consider abolishing their jobs and creating a streamlined county government headed by an elected executive.

At least that is the explanation given by Commissioner Jimmy Dimora.

Dimora said the three commissioners have their hands full wooing a Medical Mart for downtown, trying to build an administration center, and other matters. He also said he is skeptical a new form of government would help the economy.

Commissioners Tim Hagan and Peter Lawson Jones were too busy even to comment for this story."

Keep looking for that silver bullet guys, but watch your backs, cause it will more than likely bite you in the butt. Getting off the regressive tax discussion and onto a broader and already studied discussion might be a better tactic.

In today's PD I found this article on stormwater problems in North Royalton, Broadview Heights, Suburbs in Flood Regions plan to stay above water. They are finally realizing the effect of all that paving. I didn't see a plan mentioned to first assess the commercial properties with the big parking lots, like strip centers and big box stores (you know the ones like Wal-Mart that have acres of parking and pay their sewerage based on 4 sinks and 6 toilets. They didn't mention assessing a fee for amount of impermeable surface, but they say they will have to assess residents.

    So here's an out there solution for those who live in North Royalton/Broadview Heights and work in Cleveland, or Akron -- move to the city. If you are carrying multiple car payments, you can jettison one car and use transit and car sharing to save money, have easy access to arts and culture and services. Your kids can join the ranks of kids in the city schools in blocks in case you have safety concerns. It could be a sort of flood driven immigration. Damn, there are probably whole neighborhoods you could resettle. If you're scared of city life, move in groups like the early pioneers. Set up your own neighborhood watch. Load up that wagon train and stake out a spot. You can still get to the Valley and the green spaces that you probably moved there for in the first place. Heck, I bet you just wiz through those green areas without even appreciating them, since every time you want anything you don't have at home you have to get in a car. It's a bold move, sort of chic actually, but it is better than cleaning up after a flood year after year and it's better than paying for it. Like Norm said in another post, some places just need to go back to nature. Floodplains would be on that list I think.