The Great Lakes and Unsmart Growth:

Will the New Webster Water Plant Help or Hurt the Community of Monroe?

-by Jack Bradigan Spula

When it comes to fresh-water resources, North America’s Great Lakes are without peer. And more and more eyes are turning toward this incomparable resource, for good or ill.

With a combined surface area of 244,000 square kilometers (94,000 square miles) and a watershed area three times that size, this binational five-lake system contains 20 percent of the world’s fresh water and 95 percent of the US supply. It goes without saying that a resource like this can only grow in importance as continental water supplies, most notably in the arid Southwest, are drawn down further.

Already, as Sunbelt water resources come under ever-growing pressure, attention may turn again to the "inexhaustible" Great Lakes. Some observers, in fact, foresee a vast migration in reverse, accompanied by thorough redevelopment of the Rust Belt. For the moment, though, most Great Lakes communities are stuck: Populations and regional economies have been stagnant for decades.

The Rochester-Monroe County, New York, urban area is typical. After a growth spurt in the 1960s, the county population grew slowly indeed: from 712,000 in 1970 to around 735,000 in 2000. And along the way, there was even a drop (down to a US Census figure of 702,000) during the 1970s.

Still, Greater Rochester, whose urbanized area already has leached into developed areas in adjoining counties, continues to grow wildly - spreading out a stagnant population base over an ever larger footprint, and staking out ever more residential subdivisions and commercial developments on former farms and woodlands. A 2002 study by Smart Growth America, "Measuring Sprawl and Its Impact" (Ewing, R., et al.), judged Rochester twelfth worst in the US on a list of 83 sprawling metropolitan statistical areas.

Sprawl depends on services, of course. Roads, bridges, power lines, sewers, water and drainage systems can be designed to channel new development into existing built-up areas and thus create greater densities. Or the opposite, with both material and psychological causes and effects: "Infrastructure expansions into farming areas," says David Haight, New York director of the American Farmland Trust, "encourages the conversion of farmland [to other uses] and sends the signal that the community expects agriculture’s future in the area to be short and that other land uses requiring public infrastructure will be moving in soon."

One critical piece of the Rochester-area infrastructure will very soon take a great leap forward. The Monroe County Water Authority (MCWA), which supplies drinking water to residential and commercial customers throughout the metro area – and beyond – has plans for more than doubling its intake/treatment capacity. This will be accomplished simply by constructing a new treatment plant east of the city in the Town of Webster.

There’s more to the plan, of course, than a treatment facility. According to a backgrounder by Richard Metzger, MCWA director of production and transmission, the new complex, which is projected to cost $140 million or more, will include these components:

* an intake pipe that extends one mile out into Lake Ontario;

* a pumping station on the lakefront;

* a 50 million-gallon-per-day treatment plant (with much more capacity possible in the future) located three miles inland;

* 13 miles of new water mains that will hook the plant up to existing networks.

The Town of Webster’s public works commissioner, Gary Kleist, confirms that the treatment plant is "on the board" and ready to be built. The MCWA, he says, owns the Webster property it needs. Moreover, he says, technically the plan doesn’t have to conform to local zoning - and while the treatment plant is slated for an industrial area, the pumping station will be built in a residential zone.

In recent years, the MCWA has systematically been extending its reach, sometimes calming local fears about water quality and quantity, but also prompting concern about the regional quality of life, already stressed by sprawl.

As its name suggests, the MCWA, now a half-century old, was created to serve one county and one only. But the Authority’s service area now covers parts of neighboring counties, as well: Genesee, Wayne, and Ontario. (Genesee County is now almost wholly within the service area.)

The MCWA also has sought to buy out the Rochester municipal water department and its reservoirs, Hemlock and Canadice lakes, 30 miles south of the city. The city administration has so far resisted - the price offered was deemed too low, and City Hall actually has been making money from water sales. But a new mayor will take over in 2006, and the city faces eight-figure budget deficits. No one can be sure what the future will bring, but it’s certain that the bottom line will influence policy.

The county and city water systems are already physically interconnected, acting as mutual back-ups, as needed. Rochester’s Environmental Services commissioner Edward Doherty notes that an "intricate cooperative agreement" governs the partnership. But the agreement is set to expire in 2008, he says, at which point the parties "probably will change the nature of the arrangement."

Doherty cites one factor that has altered the playing field: consumption patterns. In 1978 when the agreement was signed, the city was "a net purchaser" of water, he says. No longer. Usage in the city has declined, he says. "We have become a net seller of water."

Why the turnaround? Doherty points to causes like conservation by individual customers (e.g. low-flow showerheads) and the loss of accounts through depopulation and deindustrialization. For example, he says, a Ragu Foods plant closed some years ago on the city’s west side. The plant had been using 750,000 gallons of water a day. "That," he says, "was a big loss."

The city water system’s customer base, like Rochester itself, is constrained by municipal boundaries and legal barriers to annexation and merger. But the MCWA has been crossing boundaries habitually.

In a sense, the MCWA was built to grow. Founded in 1951, the Authority planned early on to add a pair of major water treatment plants to the system, one on the county’s west side, the other on the east. The objective was to consolidate what had been a mix of private and public providers.

Construction of the westside plant - known today as the Shoremont plant, which produces 60 million gallons of drinking water per day but has a production capacity of nearly 140 mgd - began in 1960. The plant opened shortly afterward. The MCWA moved quickly on phase two, as well. "Based on... early planning," writes Richard Metzger, "the authority purchased lake-front property in [the town of] Webster for the eastside [plant] in 1965."

The MCWA, says Metzger, intended to break ground for this second plant around 1980. But the groundbreaking never happened.

Why not? In large part, as regional population growth fell off, the expected growth in demand failed to materialize. As Metzger notes, "demand side management," including conservation, had a profound effect. "Today," he writes, "the average residential customer account uses over 15 percent less water than 20 years ago; industrial facilities have reduced [their] demand by even more."

Metzger anticipates "continued, steady progress from conservation measures."

So if the customer base is barely increasing, and if individual customers are projected to use less and less, why is construction of the eastside plant going forward now?

The MCWA offers some reasons. At the top of the list, according to MCWA head James Smith, are security and reliability of supply. (Smith has now been succeeded by new executive director Edward Marianetti.)

The thinking is influenced post-9/11 concerns: "Water is the number one ‘soft target’ for terrorism," says Smith, noting that reservoirs, pumping stations and other features may be in the bull’s eye. But there are also concerns about what natural disasters might do.

Smith evokes a troubling scenario, one that’s not out of the question, geologically speaking: What if the Rochester area suffered an earthquake and the vital water transmission mains that run across the Genesee River ruptured? That could leave the eastern part of the service area isolated, unable to draw water from the westside Shoremont plant.

Such damage could take weeks to fix, says Smith. Reliance on a single plant is worrisome in any case, he says. "If Shoremont goes down for some reason, we’re out of business. That’s the thrust of where we’re at."

True, the system could draw on the city-owned Hemlock and Canadice lakes. But Hemlock-Canadice, Smith points out on a relevant chart, has a capacity of only 48 mgd, hardly more than half of wintertime demand and less than a third of peak demand in the summer. (A City webpage says the water department is "permitted to withdraw up to an annual average of 37 million gallons per day from the lakes, but flow in any one 24-hour period may not exceed 48 million gallons per day).

The Webster plant, says Smith, would boost total system capacity enough to satisfy a "projected" future demand of 200 mgd. But like the City’s Edward Doherty, Smith points to what’s actually happening now. "Our typical usage has been going down," he says. "We’re using a lot less water."

The new plant would build redundancy into the system, taking pressure off the Shoremont plant, Smith concludes. But he says there’s another benefit: improved water quality throughout the service area. Some local systems, he says, have been plagued with pollution of wells - for example, intrusion of arsenic or the gasoline additive MTBE. And other small water systems and individual wells in the region have high sulfur and iron content to deal with, he says.

Wells, says Smith, are often a "crappy" source. Contaminants like sulfur are distasteful, and they can damage appliances and plumbing, he says. Such drawbacks, he says, can be avoided by hooking groundwater-dependent systems into the MCWA, from which the smaller systems can draw higher-quality water.

What about the relation of pipes to sprawl? Smith denies that the latter follows the former; legal restrictions prevent the MCWA this, he says. "We will not expand water mains for anyone," he says. "We will allow you [only] to connect to the system."

Environmental watchdog groups view the situation differently.

Monroe County is already "one of the major sprawl areas" in the Great lakes region, says David Higby of the Albany-based Environmental Advocates of New York. Higby adds that nearby areas rank high on the sprawl index - the Buffalo-Niagara area, for example. But he singles out Monroe County for its over-eagerness, in one regard at least.

Higby charges that the MCWA has constructed a questionable hookup to the State Revolving Fund. This fund, under the auspices of the New York State Environmental Facilities Corporation, channels federal EPA money into state-run loan and grant programs for clean-water projects.

"Over the years," says Higby, "the MCWA has probably used the Revolving Fund more than anyone else outside New York City," he says. Indeed, a recent report from the New York State Drinking Water State Revolving Fund shows the MCWA is slated to get $112 million for the Webster treatment plant and related infrastructure. Apart from certain New York City projects in that same league, other recipients will get from a few thousand dollars to a few million - and the bulk of the funding will go for upgrades and add-ons clearly aimed at improving water quality. (An exception is the Erie County Water Authority, slated to get $122 million for "consolidation" of the Buffalo system.)

Higby comments further: "They [MCWA] are laying pipe into greenfields" in violation of the letter and spirit of the rules governing the Revolving Fund. "They’re very good at shaking that particular money tree," he says. He promises that Environmental Advocates will continue its investigation.

"There’s a pattern to this" throughout the Great Lakes states, says Higby. "We see it in Wisconsin [for example]. It came into our consciousness because of the Annex."

Here Higby is referring to "Annex 2001," a set of protective agreements pursuant to the binational Great Lakes Charter of 1985. The Annex, which took a giant step toward completion just this summer and was released for a two-month comment period, takes a comprehensive approach. The document’s "directives" speak to system-wide conservation: specifically, "preventing harm to or loss of Great lakes water resources" and "preventing or minimizing Basin water loss through return flow and implementation of environmentally sound and economically feasible water conservation measures."

The Annex, in sum, is a pledge to avoid "significant adverse individual or cumulative impacts to the quantity or quality of the Waters and Water-Dependent Natural Resources of the Great Lakes Basin."

It remains to be seen if massive new water projects like the MCWA’s Webster plant will be examined under the terms of the Annex and related agreements. But certainly one can argue that if a project promotes urban sprawl, it automatically increases impacts on water resources – toxic (pollution) runoff, for example. Moreover, ease of access to "endless" water supplies, matched with low cost, may cancel out progress toward maximal conservation.

That’s a lesson to be learned, in reverse, from the example of Bolinas, California. The small Marin County community is known for restrictive water policy, under the authority of the Bolinas Community Land Trust. A September 2005 Associated Press report told how the restrictions, adopted in 1971 to save water, have caused local development to "flatline."

The Bolinas experience may seem odd to people in the water-rich Great Lakes region. But it’s the kind of story that demonstrates the close relationship between water infrastructure and growth – both in volume of use and in geographical spread – and helpfully underscores the obvious.

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