Ninety percent of the Cape’s estuaries exhibit poor water quality resulting directly from excess nitrogen, mostly from septic wastewater disposal. Towns across the Cape are spending hundreds of millions of dollars on wastewater infrastructure with the goal of reducing nitrogen loading sufficiently to restore water quality.
The studies that determined how much nitrogen needs to be removed were predicated on the assumption that new development could not add new nitrogen to the system. Doing otherwise, it was recognized, would reverse publicly funded nitrogen reductions and raise taxpayer mitigation costs.
Fair to assume then that the state would ensure that the permits it issues to new developments would require any new nitrogen associated with the development be offset with developer-funded reductions in existing nitrogen loads. That assumption is not only reasonable, it is also what the state’s own rules require. The state knows that permitting new nitrogen loads without enforceable and timely offsets will delay restoration, shift costs from the private to the public sector and increase taxpayer expense.
How then does one rationalize the state’s decision to issue a permit to a developer in Falmouth that authorizes increased nitrogen loading to the nitrogen-impaired Great Pond estuary, without defined and enforceable offsets?
The simple answer is that the groundwater discharge permit issued for the Easterly development neither makes sense nor does it reflect the proper and lawful execution of MassDEP’s obligations to protect the waters of the Commonwealth. Left to stand, the Easterly permit would set a precedent that threatens the value of the public’s current and planned investment to restore our damaged waters.
APCC is proud to have teamed up with the Coonamessett River Trust and numerous Falmouth residents to appeal the Easterly groundwater discharge permit to uphold the spirit and letter of the laws protecting the Cape’s precious waters. The reason APCC has joined this appeal has everything to do with protecting the premise that new nutrient loading to impaired watersheds, regardless of the use creating that load, must be offset by the permit holder. The type of development responsible for the new loading—be it agriculture, industry, retail, or housing—doesn’t matter; the principle our appeal defends is the legal requirement that new loads must be offset to no net increase.
This isn’t a fight about whether development is allowed. The fight here is about who pays to offset the cost of new nitrogen loading in places already experiencing poor water quality.
Not only will upholding the law help timely restoration of degraded waters, it will also protect the public from having to bear the costs of private sector impacts on the environment. This is a fight worth fighting and APCC is fighting it on behalf of efforts everywhere to bring our waters back to their previous glory.
