Massive city sewer struggles will mean higher water bills

Years of Houston's cracked, clogged or flooded sewer pipes belching raw waste into residents' yards and city streets have City Hall facing a federal decree that sources say could force the city to invest $5 billion in upgrades.

As in dozens of cities across the country, the looming Environmental Protection Agency mandate likely will force Houstonians to pay sharply higher water bills to fund the improvements.

The prospect does not please Gerald Joseph, whose neighborhood near Interstate 10 and Federal struggles with sewer backups.

Driving through Wood Shadows, Joseph points at manholes that gurgle waste when it rains, homes that have seen repeated overflows, a lot where a city truck once got stuck in a swamp of sewage.

After waste backed up into his bathtub twice in one week, Joseph replaced his private sewer pipe, only to find that the problem was a clogged city pipe behind his house. A city crew cleaned the line, and he has not had a spill since.

"If they would do their part and clean it out on a regular basis, just to blow the lines out, you wouldn't experience that," Joseph said, fishing his water bill out of a clump of papers in his truck. "At the end of the day, where does the water and sewer money go that you're paying? What purpose does it serve? That's the real question."

Many of Houston's sewer overflows reach local bayous and breed bacteria. These violations of the Clean Water Act create such health risks that experts advise against swimming in local waterways, 80 percent of which fall short of water quality standards for fecal bacteria.

Rather than face a lawsuit from the EPA, which enforces the Clean Water Act, city officials have spent the last few years negotiating a so-called consent decree, a binding agreement that specifies projects aimed at reducing spills by upgrading pipes, ramping up maintenance and educating the public on how to avoid clogging Houston's 6,700 miles of sewers, such as not pouring grease down the drain.

EPA officials declined comment, and city leaders have resisted discussing details of the talks, but three sources with knowledge of the negotiations say the cost of satisfying the mandate could reach an estimated $5 billion.

Mayor Sylvester Turner has acknowledged the negotiations are "significant," and said he has discussed the decree directly with EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy and plans to soon meet with Houston's congressional delegation on the issue.

"We are not opposed to making improvements, but we want the costs to be reasonable and spread out over the next 20 years so we can avoid any dramatic spiking of ratepayer rates," Turner said.

'They're not cheap'

Brent Fewell, an environmental consultant and former top official in the EPA's water division, agreed that getting more time to comply with a decree can curtail a rate hike. Still, he said, Houstonians should expect to pay more.

"These are big-ticket items. They're not cheap, and it definitely has an impact," Fewell said. "There are some communities that have seen as much as 100 percent to 150 percent increases in their water rates based on these consent decrees."

Houston's sewers have lagged since the city's first postwar boom, with City Hall, critics say, tending to make fixes only when forced to by regulators.

Whatever sewage treatment plants could not handle in the 1960s was dumped straight into the bayous, making Houston for decades the region's single worst water polluter. The Texas Attorney General took the city to court over the issue in 1974, securing a judgment that restricted Houston's development until new plants were built.

Those investments did not end the spills, however. Another round of decrees spurred a mid-1990s effort that repaired a quarter of the city's sewer pipes and upgraded many treatment plants and pump stations.

Even that $1.2 billion program didn't fix the problem, leading to a 2005 state mandate that Houston is scheduled to satisfy this month. That mandate was to replace 1,800 miles of pipe, clean twice that much, and cut grease clogs by passing an ordinance requiring restaurants to clean their grease traps.

Jason Iken, senior assistant director of Public Works for wastewater operations, said those investments have helped.

In 2001, Public Works did not know what most of its sewer pipes were made of, and acknowledged less than a tenth were up to modern standards. Today, however, 40 percent of the city's sewer pipes were built after 2000, and another quarter were laid in the 1990s.

City data show "temporary blockages" - often, grease clogs - now are the main cause of spills, so Iken said his focus is regular cleaning, public education and replacing pipes overburdened by nearby development.

Previous efforts focused on replacing old, failing pipes. Now, Iken said, "we're focusing on preventative maintenance, we're focusing on education. We have to make sure the pipe itself is doing what it's supposed to do."

Higher spill average

Environmental lawyer Jim Blackburn said delaying improvements until regulators drop the hammer is not the right approach.

"We never have seemed to have analyzed and comprehensively addressed the problem," he said. "You've got to wonder if that's going to be the problem here, as well."

Public Works records show the city has averaged about 838 overflows annually since 2009, or about 12 spills per 100 miles of sewer pipe per year. The national average, as reported by the EPA in 2004, is 4.5 spills per 100 miles. California's current statewide average is 4.7. San Antonio reports seven, while Seattle, Kansas City and Miami average less than three.

Houston is the latest in a long line of cities to find itself in the EPA's crosshairs.

A 2013 consent decree in San Antonio will see that city invest $1.1 billion over a decade to improve its sewer system, with residents' rates more than doubling during that time.

Baltimore, Knoxville, Miami, Chicago, Kansas City, Boston and St. Louis are among an estimated 70 communities operating under multi-billion dollar federal mandates to curtail spills.

Bringing Houston's overflow numbers down will require similar spending, and the sewer fees necessary to fund it.

Houston's 1970s and 1980s decrees drove sewer rate increases, but mayoral requests for rate hikes dropped off with the advent of term limits in 1991, even as debt piled up from ongoing mandated projects.

Council members showed no greater sense of urgency. As of late 2001, the council had siphoned $326 million from the water and sewer system over the prior eight years for pet projects.

Upon taking office in 2004, former mayor Bill White locked utility revenues into a dedicated fund, raised water rates 10 percent, tied future rates to inflation, and refinanced the debt. That was not enough to prevent the debt mountain from risking a utility credit downgrade by 2010, when mayor Annise Parker took office, so she passed a 28 percent rate hike.

Utility debt remains significant, increasing the likelihood the city will need to fund the EPA mandate with rate hikes rather than bonds.

It's unclear how Houston's rates would change under such a decree, but some other cities, including San Antonio, will wind up doubling their rates.

What's affordable?

Some mayors have argued the mandates burden their poorest residents, despite EPA guidelines that allow the agency to amend the scope of its orders to keep residents' monthly water and sewer bills at less than 4.5 percent of their city's median household income.

Houston's median income of about $45,700 means water and sewer rates could rise 187 percent and still be below that "affordability" threshold. Using the city's weighted average water usage, just short of 5,000 gallons per month for residential accounts, that would take the typical Houston resident's monthly bill from $60 to $170.

Under existing rates, Census data show roughly 120,000 Houston households already pay more than the EPA threshold. A doubling of rates would boost that to at least 220,000 Houston households.

"If there's anyone to blame, it's those of us who are lifelong Houstonians," said Jim Thompson, regional CEO for engineering giant AECOM. "We've never gotten ahead of the curve. The choice is now to say, 'In order to get on a sustainable long-term investment strategy, here's where our rates really need to be.' And they're going to go up."