Green Guru Network

CSO’s are old sewers that are designed to carry sewage to treatment plants during dry weather but to bypass the treatment plants and empty directly into local waterways when it rains, so the plants don’t get flooded and damaged. Some of the 6,000 jobs that Brady referred to (back) would be for eliminating CSO’s. But it’s far from easy or quick.

Take a look, for example, at the effort it will take to solve the CSO problem in Bridgeport alone (Bridgeport is one of seven cities in Connecticut with CSO’s; New York City has them too). Here’s an excerpt from the Long Island Sound Study’sSound Update newsletter of fall 2010:

Full separation of [Bridgeport’s] stormwater and wastewater systems is projected to cost $560 million and take decades. The city has been making progress, though, and has already completed seven projects to achieve this goal with a total expenditure of $50 million. The next project scheduled will achieve separation in the Downtown, eastern portion of the South End, and northern portion of Black Rock. This project will cost $25 million, is projected to be completed in 2017, and will solve most flooding and CSO problems with a solution that (after construction) will be below ground and quite intensive.

Think of what that means. By 2017, after six more years of work, they will have spent $75 million -- and will still have $485 million worth of work left to complete. That’s daunting.

But also think about what it means from another perspective. David Carey, the director of the bureau of aquaculture in Connecticut’s Department of Agriculture, pointed out in Bridgeport that 45 oyster companies in Connecticut operate 110 oyster boats and harvest an estimated 300,000 bushels of oysters a year. Because of all the rain that fell over the weekend and on Monday morning, the CSO’s were overflowing into the Sound, carrying raw sewage. As a result, none of those oyster boats were allowed to harvest oysters.

In other words, it’s not that environmental regulations were hindering the economy; rather, the lack of environmental protection was putting people out of work.

The only conclusion I can draw is that the Republicans who want to be president are wrong: a healthy environment is good for the economy; cleaning up pollution creates jobs; pollution eliminates jobs.

Tom Andersen is the author of This Fine Piece of Water: An Environmental History of Long Island Sound (Yale University Press). He blogs at ThisSphere.blogspot.com

While the Republicans running for their party’s presidential nomination can’t seem to stop talking about how bad environmental protection is for the economy (see this story in Thursday’s Times), the elected officials and business leaders who showed up in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on Monday to show their support for the SoundVision plan were saying just the opposite:

If you protect Long Island Sound, not only will you preserve an incredibly productive ecological resource, you preserve an extremely valuable economic resource as well.

SoundVision is a two-year action plan to restore and protect the Sound, created by the Long Island Sound Study’s Citizens Advisory Committee. It is being unveiled this month in a series events organized by Save the Sound, SoundWaters, the Norwalk Maritime Aquarium, and others. Visit LISoundVision.org for more information, a link to the action plan itself, and a schedule of remaining events.

In the broadest sense, the Sound contributes $9 billion a year to the economy of Connecticut and coastal New York (that’s an inflation-adjusted number based on a 1990 study that showed the Sound’s economic value to be $5.5 billion).

But more specifically, Paul Brady, executive director of the American Council of Engineering Companies of Connecticut, said that the work to repair sewage plants and sewer pipes along the Sound would create an estimated 6,000 jobs.

In other words, cleaning up Long Island Sound is good for the economy in the very real sense that it puts people to work. And for those who wanted to look, the need for that work was evident on Monday.

The SoundVision event was held at Captain’s Cove Seaport, a combination marina-restaurant-tourist attraction on Black Rock Harbor. It is well-kept, prosperous-looking, filled with boats, docks, boardwalks, eating areas with all-weather tables, and an odd array of shops housed in colorful buildings built on a tiny scale. It is also next to a pipe that is part of Bridgeport’s combined sewer overflow system (CSO), and as speaker after speaker talked about the importance of a clean Long Island Sound, the pipe discharged raw sewage into Black Rock Harbor.

(Photos of the event)                               More

Has Long Island Sound fallen out of the public consciousness? To some extent, yes. At least that was the impression of the folks at Save the Sound (a program of the Connecticut Fund for the Environment) and the Long Island Sound Study’s Citizens Advisory Committee. They spent part of the last couple of years asking questions about the Sound and listening to the answers, and what they decided was that the Sound -- not just its problems but its qualities, its beauties -- has become less of a concern for the people who live near it.

That’s bad news because along with the qualities and beauties, there are serious problems. Hypoxia still turns dozens if not scores of square miles of Westchester, Nassau and Fairfield counties into a near-dead zone in July and August. Contaminated stormwater forces the closure of beaches with every heavy rain. Storm drains, streams and rivers carry tons of trash from the watershed into the Sound, sullying marshes and tide flats and beaches.

To change consciousness and to push for solutions, Save the Sound and the Citizens Advisory Committee came up with SoundVision, a two-year action plan to restore and protect Long Island Sound. They unveiled it for the first time on Monday, August 1, at Mamaroneck’s Harbor Island Park. The action plan has four major components: Protecting Clean Water to Achieve a Healthy Sound Creating Safe and Thriving Places for All Sound Creatures Building Long Island Sound Communities that Work Investing in an Economically Vibrant Long Island Sound Each has three to seven action steps.

For example, two of the steps under Protecting Clean Water to Achieve a Healthy Sound are:Promote green infrastructure projects in neighborhoods and in large city sites Ensure that new construction in the Long Island Sound region uses low impact development to avoid stormwater pollution You can read the others in the full report. 

At Monday’s event, the CAC co-chairs -- Curt Johnson of Save the Sound and Nancy Seligson, a member of the Mamaroneck Town Board -- summarized the details.

Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino, State Senator Suzi Oppenheimer, County Legislator Judy Meyers, and Mamaroneck Village Trustee Toni Pergola Ryan each expressed support for the plan, as did Jennifer Herring of the Norwalk Maritime Aquarium and Dianne Selditch, the center director of SoundWaters.

The plan for the day was to follow the press announcement with a two-hour sail on the Schooner SoundWaters, which was docked in Mamaroneck Harbor’s East Basin. But the presence of thunderstorms throughout the region -- and in particular a pall of heavy blue-gray clouds hanging over the Sound outside the harbor entrance -- forced the cancellation of the boat ride. Although the weather was a disappointment it did not discourage anyone or distract from the longer-range action plan. “We’ve made a lot of progress,” Curt Johnson said, “but we have a long way to go.”