Former MWRA Executive Director Paul Levy (who has worn a lot of really interesting hats in his career) provides, in CommonWealth Magazine, this really interesting take on the Boston Harbor cleanup and lessons learned from that experience can inform decisions about the slow motion implosion of the transit system of Greater Boston.  Very important reading that nicely complements the good words and insights of Peter Shelley on this blog about the Harbor cleanup.

Big questions that hang in the area include:

• Noting that the cleanup has massively improved the harbor – if we did it all over again, would we employ a “big pipe and big plant” solution to the sewage and stormwater problem in Boston or use more local and distributed methods?
• What lessons learned from these case studies can be applied to the electricity system?
• What role does the existence of the massive highway system that spans the nation (and if you want to read a fascinating description of the creation of that system check out “The Big Roads” by Earl Swift) have on our other infrastructure planning and decision making?

Any thoughts on these questions?  The comments section below awaits.

Peter Shelley, CLF senior counsel. Photo credit: Evgenia Eliseeva

Twenty-eight years ago, we at CLF said we were going to take Boston Harbor back from the state polluters for the benefit of the children at the beach, the economic opportunities around a clean harbor and the future of Massachusetts. No one at CLF even suspected that this was to be a $4.5 billion, generational effort, let alone that billions more would be needed to rebuild metropolitan Boston’s water distribution system. Last week, the final major capital project from the original litigation to create that cleaner harbor was completed, producing feelings of great satisfaction as well as nostalgia. It was the light at the end of the tunnel that CLF entered on behalf of our members so long ago. Our supporters have been patient beyond recognition.

It is safe to say that it was worth the wait and the investment. Today, Boston Harbor is swimmable and fishable. Boston now has a world-class water and sewer authority and a new National Park celebrating the Boston Harbor Islands. Billions of dollars were invested in real estate, producing thousands of jobs around the harbor in the process, and Boston Harbor now also has its own watchdog—Save The Harbor/Save The Bay, a group CLF helped form to carry our vigilance forward. While CLF was just the point of the spear that made all this happen, there is no question that we were the point of that spear.

So many of the people who made this a success story are now gone. At the top of that list would have to be Massachusetts Superior Court Justice Paul G. Garrity and Federal Judge A. David Mazzone, neither of whom lived to see the final realization of their judicial efforts. Judge Garrity singlehandedly faced down the Massachusetts Legislature and refused to budge until they released their control of the sewer and water system by creating the Massachusetts Water Resource Authority (MWRA). In the process, he may have issued the only city-wide building ban in Boston history. Judge Mazzone was the harbor cleanup program. He loved this harbor and threw his keen intellect, his brilliant strategic skills and his wonderful sense of humor—not to mention a couple of unbelievably good law clerks—into the challenge that was thrown before his court. Also in that list has to be Sam Hoar, a long time friend of CLF’s who died in 2004. Sam selflessly volunteered himself and some of the best lawyers at Goodwin, Procter & Hoar to help CLF survive the relentless legal briefing of the early days.

Among those who have moved on to other things are Doug Foy, Paul Levy, Doug MacDonald and Dick Fox. Doug Foy is gone only in the sense that he is no longer CEO of CLF. He needs no special introduction to the CLF family. His vision never faltered when he had made up his mind that something had to happen with Boston Harbor. Paul Levy and Doug MacDonald both performed project management miracles to bring one of the biggest and most complicated public works projects in Massachusetts history online both on schedule and on budget.  They, of course, were just the tip of the iceberg of the extraordinary staff at the MWRA. As for Dick Fox, lead engineer for CDM, the project design and construction lead, I’ll never forget the moment in open court when Judge Mazzone leaned his long frame forward, fixed Dick Fox in his eyes and said: “I’m going to hold you to your promises here.” Dick not only didn’t flinch; he responded “I expect you to.” This may have been a court-supervised cleanup, but make no mistake—it was a cleanup that happened because of the personal integrity commitment of lots of folks like Dick Fox.

Great credit also has to be extended to Diane Dumanowski, one of the finest reporters ever at the Boston Globe and one of the best environmental reporters in the country. Her series in the Globe on the collapse of the Metropolitan District Commission sewerage system, backed up by strong editorials from Globe columnist Ian Menzies, was the spark that ignited Doug Foy into action. Finally, no story about the Boston Harbor cleanup would be complete without mentioning Bill Golden, then solicitor for the City of Quincy, whose fateful jog on the feces-strewn Wollaston Beach in 1982 made him mad as hell and got the whole ball rolling.

CLF is not done with Boston Harbor, however. All the tributaries coming into Boston Harbor still suffer from significant pollution discharges from multiple public and private sources. These discharges expose Massachusetts residents to disease, damage the environment, and frustrate new economic opportunities. With the same energy we brought to the battle for Boston Harbor, we are hard at work fighting those upstream pollution sources with a terrific coalition of community groups and partner conservation non-profits. We look forward to similar moments of great accomplishment and satisfaction in the future when we can finally say that this great harbor’s entire watershed has a clean bill of health.

At the ceremony marking the completion of the Stormwater Storage Tunnel under South Boston Mayor Menino of Boston connected a couple of important dots and made a powerful case for how environmental protection and economic development and prosperity are allied efforts that support each other – not competing values where one must lose for the other to win.

The Mayor noted that the previous day he had been at the groundbreaking for the Vertex Pharmaceuticals headquarters at Fan Pier and stated his firm belief that a cutting edge, growing and successful business like Vertex would not be willing to make a long term commitment to the Boston waterfront if the hard work of cleaning up the harbor had not been undertaken and executed.  The Mayor was recalling the bad old days of raw sewage pouring and how the cleanup has changed Boston’s harbor from a liability into a major economic and social asset.

Obviously, we here at CLF completely agree with Mayor Menino on this essential point.

CLF has long believed that cleaning up Boston Harbor was an essential element in building a great city.  That belief, along with our commitment to addressing the ecological health of the Harbor and the larger marine and coastal environment has fueled our work on our (still pending !) lawsuit filed in 1983 and all the related activities that have swirled around that long running legal saga.

CLF also put a tremendous amount of time, particularly during the critical 1995 – 2003 period, into fighting to ensure that the development of Fan Pier and the larger area in which it sits (previously known as the South Boston Waterfront, the South Boston Seaport, the Seaport District and most recently the Innovation District) is developed in a smart way. We fought to ensure that development of this “new urban frontier” created access to all the citizens of the region by transit and foot, placing greenspace and great destinations on the waterfront and mixing together the public spaces mandated by law with housing and commercial development.  The development finally unfolding on the waterfront is guided by the infrastructure we fought to have in place and must follow the contours and mandates of the permits and rules that were negotiated.

The imperative of global warming pushes us all to live and work in efficient places where buildings consume as little energy as possible and it is easy and practical to walk to most destinations and there are affordable and available public transit options to many other places we need to go.  Nothing minimizes automobile travel, and the fuel consumption and emissions that come from car usage, like urban living and development.

Cleaning up the harbor and developing the Boston waterfront in a smart, human-scale but dense manner that creates great urban places  does indeed fire up the economic engine of Boston. As both Mayor Menino and EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding noted the other day in South Boston that urban economic engine of Boston powers so much of our region, so when we improve the environment and economy of Boston we are generating value, jobs and prosperity for New England.

The new storage tunnel will result in significantly cleaner water for beachgoers at Carson Beach in South Boston. Photo credit: bostonharborwalk.com

It’s been a busy day for South Boston on several fronts – but the dawning of a new era for a transformed Boston Harbor and the environmentalists, legislators and other officials who have been fighting for a clean harbor for nearly three decades. Today marks the opening of a massive sewage holding tank – called a CSO (combined sewer overflow) storage tunnel -  under South Boston that will store gallons of stormwater that would normally overwhelm the city’s sewer system and cause untreated sewage to be released into Boston Harbor. The change will make the beach “one of the cleanest in America” and bring the rate of beach closures down from eight per summer to one roughly every five years, according to this front page article in today’s Boston Globe.

It’s the gratifying ending to a story in which CLF has played a lead role since the beginning. Twenty-eight years ago, CLF filed one of the key lawsuits ordering that the harbor be cleaned up. Today, CLF’s Peter Shelley is one of the only original lawyers involved in the massive and long-running court case who has seen it through to fruition.  Key participants in this morning’s ribbon cutting ceremony for the new storage tunnel came on to the scene decades after the filing, in 1983, of the still-pending case that still bears the label Conservation Law Foundation vs. Metropolitan District Commission (the now-disbanded state agency that used to oversee the water and sewerage systems of Greater Boston).

The ceremony today reflected back on the long struggle to clean the harbor but, appropriately, also looked to the future.  Frederick Laskey, Executive Director of the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA), the state authority created to execute on the massive harbor cleanup, spoke eloquently about the collaboration between governments, business the advocacy community and the neighborhoods that was needed to execute on a vision of a cleaner harbor and beaches. Laskey especially noted the courage of the representatives of the many municipalities in the Greater Boston region in accepting the regional nature of the project and the need to spread the cost of creating swimmable beaches and a clean harbor across the whole metropolitan area.

State Senator Jack Hart, Secretary of Energy and Environmental Affairs Richard Sullivan (who also serves as Chairman of the MWRA Board) and  Department of Conservation and Recreation Commissioner Edward Lambert echoed Laskey’s remarks, emphasizing the importance of community collaboration and the value of clean beaches.

U.S. District Court Judge Richard Stearns, who today presides over CLF v. MDC and the continuing harbor cleanup, discussed the hard work needed to get to this day and offered a tribute to the vision of Judge David Mazzone, who had previously handled the case. In 2004, during his final illness in 2004, Mazzone handed the case over to Judge Stearns, conveying his belief that a CSO tunnel was needed and “could be completed by May 2011” for the cost of less than $250 million (in this morning’s speech, Stearns noted that the project came in right on that schedule and in fact under the initial cost estimate).

EPA Regional Administrator Curt Spalding spoke about the difficulty of executing on a project of this magnitude and the importance of core environmental laws like the Clean Water Act, which he proudly noted was championed by another Rhode Islander, Senator John Chafee, that provided clear direction regarding our national policy and the need to create clean and swimmable waters.

Thanks to the tenacity of CLF and others, today’s parents don’t have to worry that a day at the beach could make their children sick, and a new generation of kids won’t have beach closings put a damper on their summer days. But our work is nowhere near complete.  Yes, we need to continue to ensure that the right infrastructure, like this CSO structure in South Boston, is in place to treat our stormwater appropriately. But even more importantly we need to build and manage our buildings, our land and our roads in a way that recaptures as much rain water as possible.  We need to treat rain and snow as the precious resources that they are, moving away from a view that these gifts from above are a waste product that needs to be treated and shunted off into the sea. With those notions in mind, Massachusetts will continue to set an example for the region and the nation of the right way to restore a precious community resource and iconic piece of New England’s history.

The Boston Harbor Hotel is innovative in maintaining public access to Boston's waterfront with its beautiful and distinctive arch.

On Friday, June 10, CLF’s Boston office had the pleasure to host 10 members of the Indonesian non-profit organization Genderang Bahari (Maritime Spirit) Movement to discuss strategies for the preservation of historic harbors. The professional exchange was sponsored by the State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program and arranged by the local nonprofit organization WorldBoston.  Members of the movement are interested in gaining ideas and insight into how to best revive the approximately 80 old harbors in Nusantara, Indonesia.

CLF’s Peter Shelley spoke to the diverse group of engineers, architects, and project managers about the strategies behind historical preservation and the role of non-profit organizations like CLF in such processes. As a way to provide context, Peter described the history of relevant land and zoning laws in America.  Our guests were understandably surprised by the fact that the heart of Boston used to be intertidal mud flats (the current location of CLF’s Boston office was actually underwater in the 1700s), and that the laws we use today to protect public lands originate from the King of England’s mandates in the colonial era. Their amazement reflected the sometimes overlooked richness of Boston’s history.

The Colonial Ordinances of 1641-1647 granted private ownership of coastal property in Massachusetts as long as the public’s historic rights to fish, fowl, and navigate coastal lands were protected and maintained. Still in effect today, the old “fish, fowl, and navigate” public rights are broadly defined to include other public benefits. As such, the state can require private developers building on the waterfront to provide bathrooms or create walkways for the general public. In fact, CLF used this concept in the 1980s to ensure that the placement of the Boston Harbor Hotel, located on Boston’s waterfront, would not obstruct public access to the waterfront – this resulted in the design and construction of the hotel’s beautiful arched dome walkway, allowing the public a gateway underneath the hotel from the street to the harbor. The Indonesian delegates, having seen the hotel and its distinctive arch, recognized the significance of this legal tool.

In his advice to the delegates, Peter Shelley emphasized the need for having compelling vision, community support, and leverage, all of which should be further supported by an economic argument. When discussing leverage, protection, and potential obstacles, the conversation always returned to money, an internationally understood incentive and potential complication. One guest revealed that his non-profit organization faces a social problem as well, because nobody seems to care about the “local people by the sea.”

After Peter finished describing the role of CLF like that of a “watchdog,” the delegates were inspired and expressed their need for an organization like CLF in Indonesia to help them preserve their historic harbors. They were enthusiastic about the initiative, collecting several different ideas of how best to proceed with their project after listening to how public property is protected in America. At the close of the meeting, Peter left them with a poignant and lasting piece of advice. He reminded them that the process of creating a successful campaign is “not easy, but it’s certainly worth fighting for.”

Today, the U.S. EPA announced that it will join CLF’s lawsuit against the Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) for violations of the Clean Water Act. The suit, filled by CLF in U.S. District Court in February 2010, states that BWSC has failed to control polluted discharges from its storm water system, allowing it to carry raw sewage and excessive levels of bacterial, copper and zinc into Boston’s waterways, threatening the health and well-being of the surrounding communities.

BOSTON, MA  December 22, 2010 – The Conservation Law Foundation (CLF) has issued the following statement in response to the motion filed today by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) stating that it will join CLF’s lawsuit against the Boston Water and Sewer Commission (BWSC) for violations of the Clean Water Act:

“The complaint against the Boston Water and Sewer Commission documents serious failures in the system that are allowing ongoing unlawful pollution of Boston’s waterways, including the Charles, Mystic and Neponset Rivers, in some the city’s most economically-challenged communities,” said Christopher Kilian, director of CLF’s Clean Water and Healthy Forests program. “The federal government’s entry into this case is a clear indication of the urgency of the matter and the priority EPA places on it. BWSC’s inability to maintain a system that ensures clean water is a violation of the law and an affront to the people of Boston. The United States agrees with CLF that BWSC must make a major commitment now to improve water quality, as other cities have done, and restore these resources to health for everyone’s benefit.” More>>

The Massachusetts’ Water Resource Authority’s decision to release 15 million gallons of untreated sewage into Boston Harbor’s Quincy Bay during last weekend’s storm felt to many like a giant step backward in the decades-long fight to clean up Boston Harbor. The good news is that there are actions that can be taken today that could have kept MWRA officials from having to make that decision in the future—implementing green stormwater infrastructure to reduce the burden on our sewer pipes, reduce flooding and make communities more resilient to climate change.

Many of our state’s aging sewer systems become overwhelmed with a mix of rainwater and sewage during large storms. That’s why MWRA officials were stuck between a rock and a hard place, forced to choose between quietly releasing 15 million gallons of untreated sewage into Quincy Bay or letting the water flood the station and release that sewage into basements, but sparing the Harbor. The problem runs deeper than this one incident—during last week’s storm, there were equally damaging releases of raw sewage into neighborhoods and into the Mystic and Charles Rivers as well. (See video footage here).

Massachusetts can stop these incidents by investing in green stormwater management techniques to enable communities to better prevent sewer overflows and save money over the long term. Some of these techniques include the use of permeable pavement, green roofs, rain barrels, even gravel—anything that will absorb stormwater and diminish runoff from hard surfaces. These actions can be taken by homeowners in and around their homes, at the city scale by greening streets, parking lots, and alleys, and at the state level, by greening state highways and universities.  Massachusetts residents can urge their towns to adopt bylaws requiring green stormwater and green building techniques to be used in all new construction or infrastructure projects. Cities like Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York are already rolling out these techniques and finding that they are both cost-effective and environmentally sustainable.

Fortunately, we have a chance RIGHT NOW to tell the state of Massachusetts how important it is to us to keep stormwater in check. The U.S. EPA is currently working on a stormwater permit that will govern the stormwater management of communities across Massachusetts for the next five years.

Help Massachusetts prepare for the next storm before it happens. Tell our government that we need a stronger stormwater permit to govern Massachusetts waterways and keep our communities pollution-free.