Thirty Years of Straightpiping

Over the past thirty years Vermont has been on a "save the environment" tear. Beginning with the enactment of Act 250 and subdivision regulations in the early 1970s, the State has extended its regulatory powers to a once unimaginable extent. Driving this extension has been a very justifiable opposition of a great majority of Vermonters to pollution of our air and water.

So why, over these thirty years, have 14 homes in East St. Johnsbury continued to straight pipe sewage into the Moose River, with full knowledge of town and state environmental officials?

The 14 homes in question were built long before the current water quality laws. Some of them are on very small lots with a high seasonal water table. Others lots have ledge and thin soils unsuitable for backyard leach fields. The state Agency of Natural Resources could have issued an order to stop the discharges into the river, but that would have made the homes uninhabitable. So rather than evict 14 families from their homes, ANR decided the problem was a town problem.

The state suggested that St. Johnsbury extend its municipal sewer line two miles to reach the affected lots. But the town had recently bonded for a major sewage treatment plant, and the selectmen were nervous about going back to the taxpayers for another $3 million just to assist a handful of families. So the town began a series of studies which continually pushed forward the need to make a decision that would cost real money.

And the law constantly stood in the way. How about building a mini-treatment plant and discharging the treated water into the river? State law says that only municipalities can make a direct discharge into a watercourse. The 14 families would have to create a wholly new municipality, and they would have to hire a skilled technician to manage the touchy ultraviolet disinfection process. Not practical.

How about using the state's water quality revolving loan fund to underwrite a new on site disposal system? Sorry. That could only be used for municipal systems, not private systems.

And so it went , for decade after decade. Meanwhile, ANR required a landowner half a mile upstream from the straightpipes to spend $17,000 on an earth berm around his truck yard, on the rationale that dust - dust! - could possibly work its way into the Moose River and maybe plug up tiny little cracks in the stream bed where undetected trout might want to lay their eggs. But neither state nor town could find a way to stop the straightpiping.

This year saw an apparent breakthrough. A little noticed provision in the capital appropriations bill now allows the revolving loan fund to be used for private systems, if managed by a town. ANR engineers are now at work on a system that would collect sewage from the 14 homes and others, and pump it to a place where a large leach field can handle it.

Now, why has the East St. Johnsbury pollution problem, and others like it in Cabot and Shoreham, persisted all this time, while five governors professed their ardent devotion to the cause of a clean environment?

There are no villains working to preserve straightpiping. But the structure and rules of the governmental system itself give the parties involved many ways to shift and diffuse responsibility, or stall for time in the hope that problems will go away.

The ever-expanding web of laws and regulations, bureaucratic jurisdictional lines, budget demands, and political considerations can make simple problem solving by government into a major task - in this case, one that has gone 30 years without a solution. Can anyone doubt that Walt Disney World, or the Navy Seabees, or the Nature Conservancy would have had this problem solved years ago, if the government kept out of their way?

The environmental enthusiasm of many politicians starts with pollution fighting, but then turns into enthusiasm for sweeping land use control schemes - not to stop pollution, but to vest ever more power in the government over land and land owners. Maybe it's time Vermonters put people into office who will spend more time solving problems like raw sewage in our rivers, and less time promoting increased government control over the non-polluting use of our land.

August 2000