Great Lakes agreement includes sanctions for polluting municipalities

Tuesday, October 2, 2012

Reducing phosphorus into the Great Lakes is a goal of a new agreement signed last month by the federal governments of Canada and the United States. Agriculture is going to be a target but so will municipalities according to the mayor of Goderich

by DON STONEMAN

Those toughened laws, signed by top environment officials from Canada and the United States in early September  to deal with pollution in the Great Lakes, are also going to include penalties against municipal sewage plants, says the mayor of Goderich.

Delbert Shewfelt, who has represented Ontario and Canadian mayors on various international committees, witnessed the signing of the updated Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement in Washington by Environment Minister Peter Kent and Lisa Jackson, head of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Upon a second reading of the release on the new agreement, the possibility of sanctions related to sewage plant discharges "really stood out," Shewfelt says, "and they mentioned some really healthy fines." Acceptable levels for nutrients will also be reduced, he notes.

Reducing phosphorus input into the Great Lakes is one of the targets of the Great Lakes agreement, which replaces one signed in 1972. Media reports immediately after the signing specified agriculture and industry as sources of pollution in the lakes, but failed to mention the municipal sewage discharges issue.

Typically, municipalities have released treated sewage effluent into "receiving waters" – nearby lakes, rivers and streams. The plants are allowed to "bypass" treatment when sewage plants are overcome by a combination of sewage and storm water during snow melt and heavy rains. The Ontario Ministry of the Environment's Spill Action Centre keeps a record of all bypasses and sewage spills.

A record of spills and bypasses for 2011 and the first six months of 2012, by municipality, is available on the Better Farming website (www.betterfarming.com) There were 1,293 bypasses reported by plants in the province in 2011, the last full year on record. Consistently, the worst offenders for bypasses in the province are municipalities in the Niagara Region, where a total of 399 bypasses were recorded last year.

The second largest region for sewage bypass discharges was Essex County, where 183 bypasses occurred in 2011. Sewage from those municipalities eventually ends up in Lake Erie, where phosphorus loading has again become a major issue and agriculture is again being targeted.

Last year, 85 of those bypasses were reported by the economically hard hit city of Windsor.

Shewfelt says Windsor has been spending the monies it received for economic development to upgrade its sewage treatment systems, to create storage ponds where storm water can be kept until it is processed and also to divide storm and sanitary sewers under streets in the downtown core. But don't expect the results to show up in reduced bypasses right away, Shewfelt cautions. "It takes time" to achieve results, he says.

The resort town of Goderich, where Shewfelt is mayor, has "spent a lot of money" to separate storm and sanitary sewers. Records from 2011 do not record a single sewage bypass or spill for Goderich. It takes a lot of time to set things right, says Shewfelt, who is also chair of the local Maitland Valley Conservation Authority.

"The whole climate situation has changed," he says. While much of southern Ontario has been dry this summer, there have been storms such as the rain that hit the city of Thunder Bay, on Lake Superior, on May 28, causing sewage to back up into the basements of 5,000 homes.  These types of unpredictable events are only going to happen more often, he says, and municipalities need to be prepared for them. BF