Toledo learned Tuesday that it has satisfied all requirements set forth in a negotiated agreement it made 20 years ago with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to settle past violations for excessive sewage discharges.
The word came down during a morning conference call between the two parties and Senior U.S. District Judge James Carr.
Toledo Mayor Wade Kapszukiewicz made it a topic of discussion a few hours later during an afternoon news conference held inside International Park and along the Maumee River shoreline.
He said Judge Carr praised the city for completing its Toledo Waterways Initiative during the height of the coronavirus pandemic in August of 2020. The main thing holding up final approval until now was a requirement that the city fulfilled last April to create a long-term monitoring plan. The U.S. EPA has now signed off on that to the judge’s satisfaction, the mayor said.
“In doing so, we are the largest city in the country that has achieved this recognition,” Mayor Kapszukiewicz said. “We have achieved something no other city of our size has achieved yet. And we’re proud of that.”
Local officials celebrated the latest news about the Toledo Waterways Initiative while also dedicating a memorial bench named in honor of a woman who was instrumental in guiding it along for many years, the late Julie Cousino. About 50 people attended, several of them friends and family members of Ms. Cousino.
The initiative is the largest expansion and overhaul of Toledo’s sewage-treatment network in the city’s history.
It is designed to reduce overflows of filthy, untreated human waste by 80 percent. Engineers project the completed Toledo Waterways Initiative work is keeping on average about 650 million gallons of raw sewage out of local Lake Erie tributaries such as the Maumee River, the Ottawa River, and Swan Creek per year.
Left untreated, the waste that humans flush down their toilets carries bacteria, algae-forming phosphorus, and various other pathogens that impair water quality. A lot more of it used to spill into tributaries before it reached the city’s Bay View Wastewater Treatment Plant off North Summit Street.
At a cost of nearly $530 million, the massive overhaul and expansion consisted of 45 separate projects phased in over 18 years.
During the news conference, Mr. Kapszukiewicz said the initiative was a “thoughtful, steady and professionally executed” plan funded largely by a bond levy that voters approved to make it happen.
The result is that “our community is better for it, our lake is better for it, and our most precious resource, our water, is better for it,” he said.
Judge Carr used the consent decree to issue his federal court order for the work back in 2002.
The consent decree was a negotiated agreement to settle the city’s past violations. It took 11 years of litigation in federal court, from 1991 to 2002, for the two sides to agree on what needed to be done, said Ed Moore, Toledo’s Department of Public Utilities director.
Based on Toledo’s semi-annual consent decree reports, it appears that Toledo has completed construction of the CSO control measures required by the consent decree. Toledo now must perform post-construction monitoring and demonstrate that it has in fact complied with all consent decree and Clean Water Act requirements before the consent decree can be terminated.
Although EPA has not performed an exhaustive search, EPA believes that Toledo might be the first, or one of the first, communities of this size to complete construction of CSO Long Term Control measures under a federal consent decree.
Toledo is one of many cities with a history of combined sewer overflows that fouled local waterways.
The U.S. EPA made Great Lakes shoreline communities a priority to reduce those sewage spills as much as possible. That is because 40 million people — 30 million in the United States and 10 million in Canada — live in municipalities that use raw water from those lakes to produce their drinking water.
The Toledo Waterways Initiative hasn’t ended all releases, but has made them the exception and not the norm.
Records on the Toledo Waterways Initiative website show that heavy storms resulted in releases from nine sites on Aug. 5 and one on Aug. 9, but the intensity and duration overall have been greatly reduced.
While some in the past lasted days at a time, these August releases ranged from as little as one minute to just over three hours. Releases also occurred on three different dates in July, one lasting 8.5 hours. But before that, there hadn’t been a documented release since February, and releases have been much less frequent for months prior to that.
A sewage spill has not occurred from the Bay View Wastewater Treatment Plant itself since the expansion there was finished in 2006, Mr. Moore said.
Several people paid tribute to Ms. Cousino, who died of breast cancer on May 24, 2020. She was the initiative’s longtime program administrator.
A 30-year city employee, her career involved both design and construction management of water, storm and sanitary sewers, and roadway projects, according to the city’s website.
Ms. Cousino “led with passion, excellence, professionalism, and grace for so many years,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said.
“She, unfortunately, left us too soon,” he added.
Mr. Moore said it’s impossible to talk about the Toledo Waterways Initiative without thinking of her.
“You could not ask for a better employee,” he said.
Metroparks Toledo plans to put the memorial bench bearing her name into storage when the park district has renovations done inside International Park, which the city formerly owned. The bench will be brought out and put on permanent display once those renovations are completed, Mr. Moore said.
First Published September 20, 2022, 8:02 p.m.
