The most prominent case of civic engagement in wastewater treatment issues during the 1970s involved a new facility in Maryland to treat sewage and sludge that Blue Plains could not handle. In early 1973, the WSSC applied for federal funding to build a facility for Montgomery County in Darnestown. At the time, much of the county was under a sewer moratorium to curb additional growth.45 The EPA rejected the proposal, arguing that the facility’s discharge of treated wastewater near water supply intakes for the Washington area would harm drinking water quality and violate the guidelines of the Safe Drinking Water Act of 1974.46 As the Montgomery Council tried to determine a new site, the governor intervened at the behest of the state’s construction industry to site a new facility in Dickerson.47 The new location was further away from drinking water intakes, thereby offering a longer distance for dissipating effluent.48
While the business community endorsed the Dickerson plant to support current and future growth, environmentalists opposed the high costs and uncertain impact on downstream water intakes. At public meetings, the sewer ladies, in particular Charlotte Gannett, insisted that the agency revisit the facility’s costs, which more than doubled in two years, the project’s full impact on public health, and alternatives such as composting.49 Enid Miles and the Montgomery County Civic Federation used data from federal environmental agencies to insist that the plant’s discharge points should be below water intakes because existing technologies were insufficient for fully treating municipal sewage.50 The focus of local environmentalists on critiquing both the environmental and financial costs of the Dickerson project reflected a strain of smart growth in 1970s metropolitan America that returned with renewed force in the late 1990s.
In March 1976, the WSSC applied for $273 million in federal funding to build the Dickerson plant. The next month, a preliminary EPA review raised concerns about the facility’s high costs and impact on drinking water. As the agency continued its review, the sewer ladies lobbied against the project. Patty Mohler persuaded the county health department to submit a letter of concern to the county council, while Enid Miles relayed materials through a neighbor to the U.S. Surgeon General, who wrote to EPA administrator Train opposing the health impact of the facility.51 Shortly thereafter, the agency rejected the project, citing the facility’s high costs, slowdowns in projected population growth, and construction of small interim facilities that satisfied demand for the foreseeable future.52
While the sewer ladies and other grassroots environmentalists praised the EPA’s decision, elected officials as well as the Greater Washington Board of Trade argued the facility was needed to support current and future growth.53 Montgomery’s county executive, James Gleason, rebuked the EPA for wielding heavy-handed regulations to interfere in the local project, “We are being choked to death by federal bureaucracy,” he said.54 State and local officials filed suit against the agency to revive the Dickerson proposal, but a federal judge rejected the appeal.55
The defeat of the Dickerson plant left an open question of how to dispose of waste from Blue Plains. As part of the 1974 consent decree, its users were given four years to agree to a regional plan for disposing of the leftover sludge. When they failed to do so, a federal judge ordered each jurisdiction to find a site to dispose of its share. Montgomery officials decided on a composting facility as a more environmentally conscious option than incineration, but their selection of a site near the county’s border with Prince George’s County inaugurated a four-year political fight that was only resolved when the county selected another site.56
By the early 1980s, the water quality of the Potomac had improved significantly. Area treatment plants were under the CWA’s permitting system and offered an improved quality of treatment. The Georgetown Gap had been closed and intermittent raw sewage overflows above the water intake for the nation’s capital eliminated by 1974. The number and variety of aquatic plants and fish made comebacks, while pollution levels dropped enough in some places to allow swimming and other activities for the first time in nearly a quarter century. Boats filled the Potomac in Washington for bicentennial celebrations, and annual raft races began in 1978.57
Despite the gains made in cleaning up the Potomac, political challenges continued to stymie progress. Upgrading and building new wastewater treatment facilities was expensive and took time. Part of the problem was a complicated federal review process and President Nixon’s impounding of half of the funds for three years before their release in 1975. By 1977, only one-third of the funds had been spent on less than half of the nation’s facilities.58 Political conflicts over treatment facilities as well as disposing of sludge also slowed pollution control. Many of the nation’s municipal treatment facilities and conveyance infrastructure failed to meet federal guidelines for water quality by the original due date of 1977, leading Congress to push back the deadline five years. Because of these widespread delays, the Montgomery Environmental Coalition and the Environmental Defense Fund were unsuccessful in blocking the EPA from renewing a permit that allowed the continued discharge of untreated or partially treated waste from sixty different overflow points in the Washington sewer system.59 Finally, the Section 208 planning process created under the CWA, which was intended to create a regional approach to water pollution, was derailed by officials’ unwillingness to work together and openly engage the public.60 As a result of these shortcomings, states and localities were left to undertake river cleanup on their own schedules.
Perhaps the most vexing environmental concern was that improving wastewater treatment only addressed 40 percent of the Potomac’s pollution load in the Washington area. The rest came from nonpoint sources such as storm-water runoff, which the CWA did not address at the time it was originally adopted.61 Instead, runoff was largely the product of impermeable surfaces in built-up urban and suburban communities. While the expansion of Blue Plains was a major contributor to cleaning up the Potomac, there was a far tougher task ahead of effectively controlling nonpoint pollution through stronger land use and development regulations.
The Potomac in Broader Context
Enhancing wastewater treatment was the primary means by which metropolitan communities cleaned up water pollution during the 1970s and early 1980s. Even after its upgrades, however, Blue Plains was in a state of disrepair. In 1984, the EPA fined the District of Columbia $50,000, mandated repairs to Blue Plains, and required the city to hire nearly three hundred more employees to improve the plant’s operations. The EPA’s decision reflected a more litigious approach to enforcement after the political and public backlash that followed the Reagan administration’s efforts to dismantle the agency.62 But the users of Blue Plains also recognized the need to improve the facility’s operations. In 1985, they agreed to create a regional committee to oversee the facility, allocated capital and operating costs based on use, ensured Washington had priority in using the facility, and required monitoring all sewers with a minimum discharge amount.63 Unlike the Blue Plains upgrades, which were financed through the CWA, this agreement required states and localities to foot the bill. The agreement reflected a new era of pollution cleanup characterized by more limited federal financing and oversight. With the “command-and-control” era in environmental enforcement now over, community-based strategies led by civic and environmental activists became even more critical, especially given the challenges of controlling runoff and other sources of pollution.
After decades