Mashpee voters overwhelmingly approved a town meeting article (80 percent yes) and the associated debt exclusion (75 percent yes) that gave the green light to a community treatment system to reduce nutrient loading to Mashpee Wakeby Pond. While great for Mashpee Wakeby, this project has much larger implications for broader nutrient management in ponds across the Cape. We now have a blueprint towns can follow to fit pond management into their overall nutrient reduction strategies that currently emphasize estuarine water quality over ponds.
The Mashpee project is a community scale Amphidrome treatment system that will reduce nitrogen and phosphorus in the wastewater of over 200 homes near and along the northern shore of Wakeby Pond, a majestic waterway severely degraded by excess phosphorus. Septic systems will be removed and the homes within the project area will be connected to the treatment system by sewer pipes to a modest-sized facility for subsurface disposal.
The significance of this project is that it demonstrates how a targeted intervention can be done without upsetting the broader plans that a town may have, that hard to reach areas can be treated and managed with a neighborhood scale satellite system, and that such projects are highly rated in the state funding system.
The Mashpee project is a proof of concept that changes everything for those of us who had been told that investing in pond water quality will have to wait. Regardless of if that were ever true or not, it is no longer so. Lake advocates are encouraged to learn more about the Mashpee Wakeby system and see if what was done there is applicable and offers a lifeline to the pond you love.
