Managing Wastewater in Coastal Urban Areas (1993) / Chapter Skim
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E POLICY OPTIONS AND TOOLS FOR CONTROLLING COASTAL ENVIRONMENTAL WATER QUALITY
E POLICY OPTIONS AND TOOLS FOR CONTROLLING COASTAL ENVIRONMENTAL WATER QUALITY
Pages 394-430
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From page 394... ...
· Water quality considerations themselves are fragmented. Sewage treatment, stormwater management, nonpoint source control, and point source regulatory programs are often conducted in virtual isolation from one another, despite the fact that these sources are in fact interrelated, interacting 394
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From page 395... ...
· Regional land use, growth management, and natural resource planning are usually undertaken in isolation from wastewater planning and discharge permitting programs. In addition, these planning activities are often divorced from implementation activities.
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From page 396... ...
Toward Integration of Environmental Decision Making The foregoing is not intended to represent the details of any specific place, but rather to present the overall institutional challenge: how can environmental decisions in coastal areas, including specific decisions about wastewater management, be made in a large enough context with adequate mechanisms to set and implement priorities? Many past debates over specific wastewater treatment decisions have been couched in terms of priorities but have taken place in institutional situations where implementation of alternate strategies would be very unlikely, even if a particular project or proposal were rejected on the basis that some other project or proposal was more urgent.
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From page 397... ...
Planning in isolation at all levels state, regional, and local has been standard practice in the past, but this resource-destructive pattern is being called into question and actually changed by new integrated growth management systems and estuary management programs. These systems are appearing first in coastal states and thus have a special significance for this study.
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From page 398... ...
Some provisions of the act apply other management tools, however, such as financing/economic instruments (the Construction Grant Program) and limited land-use planning and growth management techniques.
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From page 399... ...
1) treatment technology based The technology based standard has generally been cons~ctereu the minimum acceptable requirement, to be applied universally, while more rigorous water-quality based standards have been implemented where necessary for particular water bodies.
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From page 400... ...
Until 1987, this assistance was in the form of federal grants ranging up to 75 percent of the cost of construction of wastewater treatment plants and other central facilities. Through 1991, the total federal expenditure for the Construction Grant Program has been about $50 billion.
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From page 401... ...
The CWA requires that all such plants meet, at a minimum, standards equivalent to secondary treatment. The numerical standards for biochemical oxygen demand and total suspended solids, which EPA as adopted as defining secondary treatment, were derived from a study of the effluent characteristics of approximately 80 typical sewage treatment plants (STPs)
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~. Although waiver applications were accepted for only a short time, this section remains enormously significant for coastal wastewater management.
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From page 403... ...
New Issues Toxic substances and nonpoint sources of pollution remain of serious concern. Accordingly, provisions of the 1987 Amendments established new procedures for evaluating toxic effects in receiving water from both industrial and municipal discharges.
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This can be illustrated in an ideal case by comparison to command-and-control measures. Later sections discuss practical limitations on economic incentives and review their performance with respect to other criteria.
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Furthermore, economic incentives distribute responsibility for abatement cost fairly, provide needed flexibility in implementation, and exploit opportunities for environmental improvement that may be unknown to regulators or beyond the reach of conventional command-and-control regulation (Boland 1989~. Types of Economic Incentives At the most elementary level, economic incentives can be divided into those that induce desired behavior by offering a subsidy and those that discourage undesirable behavior by levying a charge.
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From page 406... ...
to provide funds for scrap-tire programs (EPA 19911. While both of these programs were enacted as revenue measures, not as economic incentives, charges of this kind can potentially influence the volume of waste generated.
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From page 407... ...
Once a market price for a permit is established, dischargers with low treatment costs will be motivated to sell permits, while high cost dischargers will buy permits rather than invest in further abatement. Marketable permits have been used for some years in the air pollution abatement program.
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From page 408... ...
Where laws and regulations make it possible to hold dischargers responsible for damages that pollutants impose on others, the possibility of such liability is a potent incentive for pollution abatement. Critique While economic incentives share some common features, they may be substantially different in other ways.
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From page 409... ...
Still, the spatial distribution of discharge cannot always be predicted accurately as the buying and selling of permits can move pollutant releases from place to place within the defined market area. Economic incentives are expected to be become fully effective shortly after implementation (allowing for any needed installation of equipment)
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From page 410... ...
Not all economic incentives are suitable for all regulatory tasks. While some are broadly applicable, such as effluent taxes and marketable permits, others are more suited to specific applications (e.g., product charges and deposit-refund systems)
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From page 411... ...
Under command-and-control regulation, the nature of this investment is known with some accuracy. In the case of economic incentives, however, the least-cost investment strategy depends on the type and level of economic incentive expected, future abatement costs, and other somewhat uncertain data.
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From page 412... ...
Some economic incentives are specifically intended to influence input or product choice (product charges, tax differentiation, deposit-refund systems)
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Three types of planning frameworks are relevant to wastewater management in coastal areas: 1. Comprehensive land-use and growth management planning at the regional and state level.
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From page 414... ...
These planning and implementation programs bear many similarities to comprehensive land-use and growth management strategies, because of the close tie between population pressures and the most significant threats to these water bodies. For example, stormwater management is a significant feature of both types of approaches, and many of the essential features of growth and land-use plans, such as confining urban sprawl and protecting environmentally sensitive areas, have direct benefits to water quality and marine resource protection.
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From page 415... ...
regional ecosystem and the effects of pollution; · the need to broaden the scope of traditional water quality programs, for example, the need to address accumulations of toxic metals and chemicals in sediments underlying the water column; · the need to address many problems simultaneously in view of the absence of any one dominant threat to water quality; · the inadequacies of existing water-quality programs, including the NPDES permitting process; and · the need to sustain political support for implementing complex, longterm plans in the absence of a steady flow of new crises and catastrophes. It must be recognized that to be successful, these regional water body plans must be living, iterative processes tied to good monitoring and measure ments of progress.
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From page 416... ...
With such enforceability and support, planning strategies can be extremely effective and offer the best hope for controlling nonpoint and stormwater pollution problems and the best way to consider the wastewater treatment issue as part of a bigger picture. Efficiency Because planning strategies offer an opportunity to set and implement priorities in a broad context, they should result in efficient implementation expenditures.
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From page 417... ...
It is also a good mechanism for structuring and implementing decisions and management strategies for regional water bodies in coastal areas. Without a planning approach, nonpoint and stormwater management pollution problems will not be solved, and specific water-quality decisions of any sort, including point source treatment decisions, cannot be made in the context of comprehensive strategies and priorities.
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From page 418... ...
Even in industrial facilities subject to point source NPDES permits, individual decisions about equipment maintenance, raw materials, and processes, while ideally made within the parameters of sound permitting requirements, have an important and varying impact on the nature and amount of actual discharges. Trained environmental professionals are in demand in both the private and public sectors, and the need for basic environmental literacy among the public is increasingly apparent, as it is expected that both professionals and the public grasp the relationship of multiple actions and factors and act on that understanding.
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From page 419... ...
Funding citizen involvement programs such as labeling stormdrains can do double dutyaddressing a specific water-quality problem while building a more general environmental ethic. Education can also overcome the confines of compartmentalized regulatory programs by integrating environmental information and strategies.
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From page 420... ...
Pollution prevention programs Agencies and business associations are increasingly emphasizing "pollution prevention pays" and the technical information to encourage source reduction. Because most regulatory programs focus on the end of the pipe, prevention has largely stayed in the province of education, although, ideally, regulatory pressure and education would work together to achieve prevention.
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From page 421... ...
The program has also demonstrated the value of linking hands-on activities, such as cleaning up a stream or beach or taking water quality samples, with broader educational objectives, such as "how can I as a citizen take care of our water resources? " or "what are all the threats to this watershed, and what needs to be done"?
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From page 422... ...
Education is uniquely suited to address nonpoint pollution, stormwater contamination, and pollution prevention and to achieve an overall environmental consciousness linking air, water, land, and other en
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From page 423... ...
For example, a good technical assistance program targeted to a particular industry will take a top-to-bottom approach to the facility, looking at all of the environmental issues and opportunities for pollution prevention. Single Versus Cumulative Impacts.
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From page 424... ...
In a typical year, the private sector pays directly about two-thirds of the total cost of wastewater management. (In 1988, the business community spent $21.6 billion for water pollution abatement and control, compared with a total expenditure including regulation, monitoring, and research of $33.2 billion LBureau of the Census 19913~.
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From page 425... ...
Financing Alternatives The number of unique financing methods available to wastewater management agencies is very large. Numerous variations of each general type of method are possible; a number of different financing methods can be combined, either in parallel or sequentially, to produce an overall financing strategy.
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From page 426... ...
These dedicated taxes may be levied on activities thought to contribute to water pollution costs: e.g., on value of manufacturing industry shipments. Where taxes or effluent charges are levied on pollutant discharges, it is common to dedicate the resulting revenues to wastewater management purposes.
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From page 427... ...
However, just as they require no local legislative action, they are not subject to local control and may appear and disappear unpredictably, without regard to relative need. Debt Another option is the possibility of meeting wastewater management costs with borrowed funds.
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From page 428... ...
Dedicated taxes may vary with changes in the taxed activity; user charges fluctuate with changes in economic activity, population, or tariff level; intergovernmental transfers may be subject to reduction or discontinuance in times of fiscal stress. Where variations in the revenue flow are accompanied by changes in financing requirement, as is the case where revenue is derived from user charges and the service area population changes, the indicator of interest is the net revenue (total revenue less total costs)
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From page 429... ...
User charges have a very different characteristic. User charge revenue is the result of voluntary payments for wastewater management services: if the service is not provided, no payment is made; if the service is too expensive, less will be used; if less service is provided, less revenue will be obtained.
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From page 430... ...
Report of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Economic Incentives Task Force, March 1991.
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