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Editorial: Bad decisions led to St. Petersburg's sewage crisis

 

A scathing state report on St. Petersburg's massive sewage spills erases any lingering doubts that Mayor Rick Kriseman's administration recklessly closed a sewer plant before adding capacity elsewhere.
A scathing state report on St. Petersburg's massive sewage spills erases any lingering doubts that Mayor Rick Kriseman's administration recklessly closed a sewer plant before adding capacity elsewhere.
Published July 24, 2017

A scathing state report on St. Petersburg's massive sewage spills erases any lingering doubts that Mayor Rick Kriseman's administration recklessly closed a sewer plant before adding capacity elsewhere. It also accuses the city of violating state law and questions the wisdom of other decisions, from relying on deep injection wells to pursuing a plan to make methane gas to power city vehicles. In its sweep and its directness, this frank assessment raises even more concerns about the city's past negligence and its future plans to create a reliable sewer system that protects the public health and the environment.

The draft report by the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission obtained Friday by the Tampa Bay Times offers a history lesson on St. Petersburg sewage. It points out that the city did not increase its wastewater capacity since the 1970s, even as demand rose over the last 20 years as the population increased. It also cites decades of inadequate funding to maintain the sewer system, spanning every administration since the city adopted the strong mayor form of government in the early 1990s. That would include the tenure of former Mayor Rick Baker, who spent much of his time in office between 2001-10 complying with a state order stemming from spills in the late 1990s and now is running against Kriseman.

But by far the most stinging criticism in the report is for the Kriseman administration, which has been the subject of federal and state investigations following nearly 200 million gallons in sewage discharges in 2015 and 2016. While Kriseman routinely points out the city initially decided to close the Albert Whitted sewage plant under former Mayor Bill Foster, the report places the blame clearly on the incumbent's administration for closing the plant in April 2015 before new capacity was added. It notes that the decision to ignore a 2014 consultant's report about options to first increase capacity at the southwest sewage plant, then only build a storage tank there later, "was essentially a gamble that they would not have a wet weather event.''

Of course, the gamble backfired. The sewage spills of 2015 were followed by even bigger spills last year after heavy rains that the report says were not nearly the "historic'' storms the city has claimed. This wasn't just bad luck; it was terrible decisionmaking. As the report notes, the city could have requested money from a state loan program to add sewage capacity. Instead, it sought $63 million from that loan program to make methane gas from sewage sludge to power city vehicles. In Kriseman's haste to go green, he invited an environmental disaster.

Now the sludge-to-methane gas construction project is well under way, but the report questions the safety of its location at the southwest sewage plant so close to Eckerd College. It notes methane gas is highly flammable and explosive, and it's clear this entire project should be re-examined. Finally, the report questions the extensive use of deep injection wells for waste water, which it says follows an "out of sight, out of mind'' mentality in the city.

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Kriseman and Baker debate tonight in their expected final meeting before the Aug. 29 election, and the sewage crisis is bound to come up. St. Petersburg voters should ask themselves which candidate they most trust to oversee a sewer rebuild that will require years of effort and hundreds of millions of dollars to complete.