New York City Aligns With Portland in EPA Legal Fight
Posted on: Friday, 31 March 2006, 21:00 CST
By Anna Griffin, The Oregonian, Portland, Ore.
Mar. 31--Portland has gotten some big-city help in its battle against the Environmental Protection Agency.
New York City has joined Portland's challenge of a new federal regulation requiring cities with unfiltered, open reservoirs to take costly new steps to guard against the parasite cryptosporidium. For Portland, the new regulations could mean treating water at the Bull Run reservoirs near Mount Hood and either treating it again when it reaches city limits or covering the reservoirs at Mount Tabor and Washington Park.
City Council members and Water Bureau managers want to avoid those new steps -- in part because they could cost ratepayers hundreds of millions of dollars and in part because, they say, the risk of contamination is low. The council agreed this winter to spend $355,000 on lawyers' fees in the fight.
Federal regulators began looking at cryptosporidium as a possible health threat after a 1993 outbreak killed nearly 100 people and sickened more than 400,000 in and around Milwaukee.
The last time scientists checked Portland's water, they found little to no trace of the parasite and scant possibility of an outbreak. Sewage and animal waste are two common sources of cryptosporidium, and Bull Run is a pristine environment devoid of animals and untouched by humans.
On March 16, city lawyers filed a broadly worded petition with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, asking judges to determine whether the new EPA regulation "is arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion" or otherwise faulty.
New York City lawyers filed to join the challenge the same day, also contending that federal regulators overestimate the risk of cryptosporidium.
Their petition is more specific, arguing that the new EPA regulation "impedes the city's ability to make rational decisions on how to allocate its $16 billion, 10-year capital program for water and wastewater." New York lawyers contend that there is simply no room to build a treatment plant for cryptosporidium at Hillview Reservoir, an uncovered facility just north of New York City that at times handles as much as 90 percent of the city's water, and no reason given the small risk posed by cryptosporidium.
New York already plans to build a $580 million ultraviolet treatment plant upstream of Hillview Reservoir to deal with cryptosporidium and other potential contaminants. Portland has declined to take such a step.
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Source: The Oregonian
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