More FDEP environmental crime fines for City sewage spills

Outrageous that City had 18 sewage spills in less than one year.

City to be fined, again.

Fines should be paid by City Attorney, City Public Works Director and City Manager, not you.

Despicable that City staff would have originally placed this on "consent agenda." It should have full public comment.

When will they ever learn?

After no response to text messages and telephone calls to the City Manager, JOHN PATRICK REGAN, P.E.  I reported several of the spills to the National Response Center at the time, making it impossible for the City of St. Augustine to coverup its environmental crimes.

When will they ever learn? Eighteen sewage spills, some of which I reported to FDEP only after I reported them to City Manager without any response from him. How gauche and louche. Lincolnville is the "Pollution Peninsula," and the scourge of environmental racism persists. Much of the problem is the result of Robber Baron Henry Morrison Flagler, his hotels and Florida East Coast Railroad filling in Maria Sanchez Creek (now Cordova Street).

Let's explore the possibility of a lawsuit to make FEC Ry. pay for remediation of the frequent flooding and sewage spills.

St. Augustine, environmental agency reach agreement on sewer spills
Posted: May 7, 2016 - 11:02pm | Updated: May 7, 2016 - 11:21pm
By SHELDON GARDNER
sheldon.gardner@staugustine.com
The city of St. Augustine and the Florida Department of Environmental Protection are finalizing a plan to address 18 sanitary sewer overflows and spills that happened in the city over the course of several months.

The consent order, one of several issued for the city since 2008, requires a corrective action plan and for the city to pay a fine or do an in-kind project. It is up for approval at Monday’s City Commission meeting, and City Manager John Regan said he plans to pull it from the consent agenda for discussion.

The city plans to hire a consultant to handle the consent order projects. With penalties from the consent order or an in-kind project, the cost to the city could be more than $30,000.

The consent order is basically a working order between the city and the FDEP to find ways to minimize the discharge to the environment in the future, Regan said.

“In our case, over a period of time from July 2015 to February 2016, we had 18 events where we had some form of a sewage spill,” Regan said.

Several of those spills were related to heavy rains in September, some were from power failures, blockages, a faulty meter or equipment failure, according to the consent order. A sanitary sewer collects normal household waste.

The largest spill in that time frame was an 18,000-gallon spill in July caused by a faulty meter that caused a discharge into a waterway, according to the order. The order lists “E. Marina Cove” as the location of the incident.

The city typically has 8 to 10 spills a year, of varying size and impact, Graham said. The spills are reported regardless of size and whether they go into a body of water.

Several of the 18 spills cited in the FDEP’s consent order are 20 gallons or less.

“They’re challenged by very old infrastructure,” said Jim Maher, assistant director of the northeast district of the FDEP. But he added that he believes the city is headed in the right direction.

The city, “under its own initiative,” finished projects to minimize the impact of the spills and to help prevent something similar from happening in the future, according to the consent order.

Those projects include equipment and instrumentation replacements at a lift station worth $137,000 and “calling out emergency pump contractors and authorizing [the city] employee overtime to control [spills] during very high rain events at a total cost in excess of $60,000.”

The city also installed other equipment worth more than $80,000, and the city budgeted more than $990,000 for sewer infrastructure upgrades for fiscal year 2016, according to Graham.

A consent order is required at the will of the FDEP, and whether to issue a consent order is handled on a case-by-case basis, Maher said. There’s no set threshold for when one is issued.

“It was the number of incidents of the spills that made this appropriate for a consent order,” Maher said.

He said water quality violations resulting from some of the spills were also a factor in requiring the consent order.

The city has had at least four consent orders since 2008, excluding the current order, according to a document provided by Graham.

The latest consent order says that within 90 days of the order going into effect, the city will submit a Capacity Management Operations and Maintenance assessment report to the FDEP. That will include information on vulnerable areas that need improvement, Maher said.

The city will also make a Corrective Action Plan that addresses possible future spills based on what the assessment finds, according to the consent order. The city also has to come up with a plan of study that “should identify which areas in [the city’s] sewer system need additional work to prevent future [spills].”

The FDEP will decide whether to accept the city’s plans, and the city has to give FDEP updates on the plan’s implementation.

Penalties and other FDEP costs are also part of the consent order — the city has 30 days to pay $5,500 to the department, or they can implement an in-kind project that the department would approve.

Graham said the city would like to do an in-kind project but has not made a decision on a project.