Smarter Growth. John H. Spiers

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 of neglect, the pollution of the Chesapeake Bay, into which the Potomac drains, began to garner attention in Greater Washington and the eastern shore of Maryland. The context for cleaning up the bay, however, was rather different from the Potomac. While environmental concerns were key for the latter, economic concerns centered on the declining stocks of seafood for Maryland’s fishing industry drove the former’s cleanup. The political landscape had also changed. The bay cleanup began as conservative opposition to environmental protection privileged voluntary agreements over regulations.⁶⁴ The governors of Maryland and Virginia and the mayor of Washington, D.C., signed two agreements during the 1980s for cleaning up the bay. While they helped improve water quality for wildlife, expansive regional growth and lax accountability limited their effectiveness. Although the bay’s cleanup was less successful than that of the Potomac in the prior decade, it laid the groundwork for treating the river as a regional resource to be protected.⁶⁵

      At a more local scale, the cleanup of the Anacostia River shifted the conversation about water pollution in Greater Washington from wastewater treatment to more diffuse and difficult-to-control sources. The Anacostia, a tributary of the Potomac, flowed through primarily urban communities in Southeast Washington and Prince George’s. Nearly half of the river’s watershed consisted of impermeable surfaces like streets and rooftops that fostered runoff, while the river itself, according to one account, was a “silted wasteland of mud, stench, murk, trash, and sparse aquatic life” that was far more polluted than the Potomac.⁶⁶

      Despite environmental conservatism within the federal government, the 1980s and early 1990s became an opportune time for cleaning up urban rivers and waterfronts. In 1987, Congress amended the CWA to better regulate storm water and related pollution, but the standards were more limited than for wastewater treatment and were not fully implemented until the end of the century.⁶⁷ Federal investment in cleaning up water pollution had also receded. Cleaning up the Potomac cost about $5 billion between 1970 and 1990, but federal grants subsidized much of the expense. As the EPA’s grant program for wastewater treatment facilities wound down, few sources of federal money were available to clean up the Anacostia and other urban rivers.⁶⁸

      State and local actors stepped into the void to craft a new model of environmental stewardship. The governments of Maryland and Washington, D.C., signed two agreements in the 1980s to address combined sewer overflows in the District of Columbia as well as heavy erosion and sedimentation in Maryland, which came primarily from quarrying operations.⁶⁹ An unusual combination of civic, environmental, and business interests also joined forces to broaden the scope of river cleanup from pollution control to watershed and wildlife restoration.⁷⁰

      Compared to the Potomac, the Anacostia garnered little attention for cleanup until the late 1980s because of the geography of the region’s population. The Potomac flowed through mostly middle- and upper-income suburbs, where many environmentalists and supportive public officials lived, and featured expanses of open space or low-density development along the waterfront. The Anacostia, however, flowed through industrial sites like the Navy Yard and mostly poor urban communities, whose access to the river was mostly blocked off by highways and whose residents faced far more immediate shortcomings in housing, schools, and police than their suburb peers.⁷¹ District residents, for their part, had been largely absent from discussions about the Potomac. In contrast, they became more involved with the Anacostia as part of a nascent environmental justice movement concerned about the location and disproportionate impact of polluting facilities on poorer communities and those of color.⁷²

      In 1989, a handful of Washington residents established the Anacostia Watershed Society to encourage citizens to become caretakers of the river.⁷³ The group’s leading figure was Robert Boone, who moved to Washington in the mid-1980s. Boone worked for an environmental agency tasked with monitoring the Anacostia and was outraged about all of the trash, sewage, and toxic chemicals that poured into the river. He turned his frustrations into action, joining lawsuits to contest runoff from the Navy Yard and leaking sewage in D.C. and Maryland. Boone was also an avid outdoorsman, hosting boat trips for schoolchildren, D.C. politicians, and members of Congress to learn more about the river. In a 2008 article reflecting on two decades of service for the society, Boone, now a “grey-haired former hippie with a temper like a wasp,” offered a prescient statement on the importance of the public’s investment in the river, “We are here to be stewards of this … and we have let down our mantle.”⁷⁴

      The Anacostia’s early cleanup featured more hands-on public involvement and educational efforts than with the Potomac. By late 1991, dozens of projects were under way to clean up storm water and trash, reach out to students through environmental education, plant trees along the shoreline, and build hundreds of acres of new wetlands. Between 1987 and 1994, fish populations and underwater grasses increased significantly.⁷⁵ One of the most successful projects built a thirty-two-acre marsh to fill in a mudflat near Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens, which restored aquatic life after years of neglect. New recreational opportunities for boating and biking also became more prominent as conditions improved.⁷⁶ By the mid-1990s, local concern about the river had reached a high point. A survey by the D.C. Coalition for Environmental Justice found that three-quarters of registered voters wanted more done to clean up sewage and trash in the Anacostia, while 20 percent identified a medical problem caused or worsened by pollution.⁷⁷

      The long-delayed cleanup of the Anacostia offered a new СКАЧАТЬ