NJDEP Commissioner Agrees To Combined Sewage Summit by Lisa Kelly
In his letter to Jackson, Sheehan, who is a member of both the NJ CSO Group and the Bergen CSO Group, questioned the goals of the state-mandated Citizen Advisory Committees. “I was under the impression that the purpose of these committees was to advise the CSO operators how to meet the goal of eliminating CSOs,” Sheehan wrote. Sheehan said that at a recent CSO group meeting at the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, Hatch Mott MacDonald gave a presentation that highlighted several engineering-based technologies. “Each technology . . . was represented as being extravagantly expensive to design, permit, install and maintain,” Sheehan wrote. “Worse, each was given very little chance of actually meeting the CSO elimination goal.” Sheehan said he would rather see exploration of “watershed-based solutions that, if adopted, would diminish the amount of stormwater flows that enter sewer systems thus greatly reducing the incidence of overflows.” Examples include green roofs, pervious paving on parking lots and other public spaces, pocket parks in urban neighborhoods, increasing the number of trees in our urban centers, etc. According to Hatch Mott MacDonald, a consultant to the CSO groups, “DEP had mandated the use of the very technologies featured in their presentation . . . and because this mandate was embedded in the CSO GP, the CAC could not deviate from these very expensive, end-of-pipe ‘solutions.’” Sheehan requested the meeting with Jackson to “take control of this situation as soon as possible and convene a meeting/workshop to include representatives from . . . (NJDEP), New Jersey’s Waterkeepers, the CSO operators and their consultants.” In her reply, Jackson wrote, “Input such as you are providing is indeed valuable. We encourage active participation and recommendations from all concerned interests in this important undertaking, and will reinforce to our permittees that the control measures you are advocating cannot be summarily excluded from consideration. “While the implementation of measures you have suggested will reduce the quantity of surface runoff entering a Combined Sewer System (and hence the overflow), they will not eliminate CSOs altogether. Technologies that control pathogens will still be need for the remaining overflows.” The requested meeting is the process of being scheduled. What is a CSO? The towns of Hackensack, Jersey City, North Bergen
and Ridgefield Park operate Combined Sewer Systems, where stormwater and
sanitary sewer flows mix during storm events. Through 29 Combined Sewer
Overflows (CSOs) on the Hackensack River, raw sewage pours untreated after
heavy rains into the Hackensack River, a natural resource otherwise on the
rebound. |
In response to a letter sent by Captain Bill Sheehan,
executive director of Hackensack Riverkeeper, Lisa Jackson, Commissioner of the
New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, has agreed to set up a
meeting to discuss concerns about the Combined Sewer Overflow General Permit
Citizen Advisory Committees (GP CAC).