For almost two decades, the Cape and the state have been building a set of financing tools that have broken the barriers to progress on wastewater management needed to improve water quality. The lynchpin of this wildly successful financing strategy is the State Revolving Fund (SRF) loans for municipal projects. It is against this backdrop that APCC was stunned by proposed changes to the terms of future project financing that is proposed to begin this year. APCC submitted comments to DEP to push back against changes to the financing approach that have the potential to stop dead in its tracks all progress being made on wastewater management on Cape Cod.
With no advance public notice, the draft 2025 Intended Use Plan (IUP) caps towns to $50 million in financing and provides no carryover costs for new projects in subsequent years.
The towns proposing projects for the 2025 funding cycle did so assuming that the terms of financing would be what they have been in prior years. The simple fact is that few, if any, towns proposing projects that require multi-year financing will be able to obtain voter approval of the entire debt for a project with uncertainty about SRF funding past year one. Few town meetings will proceed with funding a large multi-year project lacking clarity on the debt and subsidy structure of the financing.
The Cape projects are big because the problems we are solving are big. Arbitrary limits on how much a town project can be financed is the functional equivalent of not offering financing at all.
APCC believes that the changes to the 2025 IUP discussed above must be rescinded and that the terms and conditions of financing revert to those that have been historically in place. Supplementing future SRF capacity through the upcoming Environmental Bond is an obvious source of additional funding that the Cape needs. APCC will work with the Healey administration and our legislators to develop an approach that continues to build on, instead of undoing, the progress we are making on water quality improvement and wastewater management.
