System of a Down Isn't the Only Group Concerned About "The Toxicity of Our City"Water Quality and WasteWater Treatment Loom Large In Many Minds

Our readers may recall that as the question of the composition of leachate and the general quality of Geneva’s drinking water loomed large this past summer, we discussed City of Geneva public works director Gordy Eddington’s guest editorial in the Finger Lakes Times. (You can reread that post here) We wrote, “Eddington’s piece was really not about leachate at all, but, rather, the reported performance of the City’s wastewater treatment plant. The City’s plant and our water, he says, are in compliance with various regulatory requirements.” Eddington’s guest piece came on the heels of a Finger Lakes Times series on landfill and leachate issues. In addition to the fact-finding efforts related to that series, the local environmental group Finger Lakes Zero Waste was filing a series of Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) requests for data including the City’s own water quality analysis.

That editorial piece was intended, we assume, to put the public’s mind at ease about the quality of the City’s wastewater treatment system and its ‘effluent’ (discharge) into Seneca Lake. Our post tried to point out that compliance with permits should be seen as the minimum criterion on which we would evaluate the willingness and ability to accept and treat runoff from the area landfills that have become regional (and in some cases, international) dumping grounds. We focused on the need to consider pollutants not currently tested for, but that might pose health hazards if passed untreated into Seneca Lake, the source of drinking water for many in the Finger Lakes region.

We stated that Eddington’s desire to provide public reassurance about the wastewater treatment plant’s compliance was understandable and appropriate, but we urged him to make data from the City’s internal testing of the leachate public-- to improve the fact set available to Council, and the public, before the work session dedicated to the topic.

Finger Lakes Zero Waste has reported that the City has been slow to produce the records requested under FOIL. But it is a different set of FOIL requests, in a different venue, that have provided all groups interested in this topic with a better set of reliable data. The new group inquiring about this topic? Not the Finger Lakes Times, but the New York Times, for their series, “Toxic Waters.”

The second installment in that series, an article entitled “Clean Water Laws Are Neglected, at a Cost in Suffering” discloses violations of the Clean Water Act that, while reported in a central database, have gone largely unaddressed by state and federal regulators.

The New York Times offers maps and tables which fill in additional details and provide more information for a better analysis of the big picture of water quality compliance. One map of registered “pollution points” in New York State (this includes any user who discharges material into groundwater, including waste water treatment plants, industries, farms, etc.) shows there are 4,606 facilities in New York State that fall under the EPA’s direct supervision.

The New York Times ranking of polluters, by violation, shows the City of Geneva’s Wastewater Treatment plant (Marsh Creek WWTP) as #22 in New York. In other words, of the 4,606 facilities in all of New York State overseen by the EPA, only 21 had worse EPA violation statistics than Geneva. (Click here for the chart)

If anyone wanted to check things out for themselves, the New York Times piece provides direct links to the EPA’s online data reports for each facility. So, of course, we took a look at the City of Geneva’s report to find out the details behind these rankings. After all, the article said that some ‘violations’ were merely administrative issues, like missing reporting deadlines, and not necessarily violations of the issued permits. Unfortunately, it seems that Geneva has more than a mere administrative problem. Based on the chart, “Three Year Compliance Status by Quarter,” the City of Geneva’s Marsh Creek plant suffered from non-compliance for 12 out of 12 quarters, including the most recent reporting quarter ending March 2009. (Click here for full details)

According to the chart, “effluent violations are displayed as the highest percentage by which the permit was exceeded for the quarter. Bold, large print indicated Significant Non Compliance (SNC) effluent violations. Shaded boxes indicate unresolved SNC violations.”

Geneva has bold, large print entries in three of the ten criteria: Chlorine, Settleable Solids, and Total Suspended Solids. In the last reported quarter (January-March 2009), Settleable Solids exceeded the permit by 233%; Total Suspended Solids by 109%; and Chlorine exceeded the permit by 70% earning a designation as an “unresolved” significant non compliance effluent violation.

On a brighter note, we should point out these numbers actually appear to be an improvement over the noncompliance statistics from previous quarters, perhaps due to recently completed upgrades at the facility. For instance, the same time last year (Jan-Mar 2008), Settleable Solids exceeded the permit by 13233%. That’s not a ‘typo.’

The June editorial piece left an impression of compliance, but we believe more information is needed with regard to this database of noncompliance. In terms of handling leachate, it would be good to know how much of this noncompliance is due to events that occurred as a direct result of the leachate, or when leachate was present in the city system. But even if the leachate stream ‘dries up,’ it seems that Council and the appointed Green Committee should discuss the way in which local monitoring and oversight can track with the monitoring done by the epa, so that future results don’t come as such a surprise, and so that we can more assuredly answer the question posed in a previous post: “How Clean Is Our Water?” To answer these questions, it seems that City Council and its Green Committee should echo our earlier request to the Director of public Works to please “show us the data!”

Filling It Up at the City Pump (Part I):Why Doesn't the Amount Coming In Equal the Amount Going Out?

The City of Geneva maintains its own little filling station, consisting of two pumps which dispense gas and diesel fuel to designated City vehicles. Certain City workers, and some staff from two other, non-City agencies (the Geneva Housing Authority and the Geneva Business Improvement District—more about that in Part II) are authorized to fill it up at the City pump.

The City purchases the fuel from distributors at a price determined by a state bidding process, which helps to keep costs down. In January 2005, the City paid $1.64 per gallon for diesel and $1.24 for gas. Three years later, by the first half of 2008, prices had climbed to $3.66 for diesel and $2.81 for gas, and then peaked that summer. That was back when the national average for a gallon of regular gas was at $4.06 (retail). In the meantime, it’s come back down, to $1.77, in January 8, 2009, and, currently, to $2.72, in our area.

In 2006, the City spent $231,037 (actual) for fuel. Last year, 2008, at budget preparation time, City staff said that as of July 31, 2008, the City had exhausted its entire fuel allocation for the 2008 budget year. In reaction, the 2009 budget, passed by Council, included an increase of approximately 90% in spending on fuel, bringing the appropriation to a whopping $376,617! If that figure tracks directly with the usage records at the Comptrollers office, it would mean actual fuel costs for the City have risen about 63% in the three years from 2006 to 2009. That’s an increase of more than 20% per year for the past three years.

As an aside, we note that with gas half the price it had been when the budget was being prepared, there ought to be substantial savings for that line item in 2009. But, it’s not quite that straightforward. The price of fuel and the amount used fluctuate in any given year according to variables that include weather, number of fire calls, etc. With the snow that hit us earlier in the year, we’ll have to see what happens to actual spending.

According to records maintained by the City Comptroller, the vast majority of fuel is used by two departments: Highway and Police. The Police department uses exclusively gas, while Highway uses both gas and diesel, which has always been more expensive than gas. We submitted a Freedom of Information Law request (FOIL) for these records. According to the City Comptroller, in January 2005, Highway used a total of 3,348 gallons of fuel; Police, 1,753 gallons. Four vehicles in City Hall, counting the then-City Manager’s company car, used 458 gallons. For the entire 2005 year, Police used a total of 19,996 gallons of fuel. City Hall used 3,411. For 2006, Police used 19,581, while City Hall used 466 gallons.

According to the City Comptroller, City departments, such as Fire and Police, are billed by the City itself for the fuel that department has used. Those departments have a “gas and oil” line in their individual budgets that they transfer to the General Fund as payment for those bills. The money received from those departments appears as revenue in the City budget. (What the City had spent initially for the fuel is listed as a budget expense.)

You would think that “gas and oil” revenue would, therefore, equal “gas and oil” expenditures. It seems like a principle of Accounting 101 that the amount coming in should equal (or, better yet, exceed) the amount that went out. For some reason, it doesn’t. And we don’t know why. In other words, if the City buys, in bulk, $100 (actual) worth of gas, then revenue (actual) coming back in to the City from departments for their share of that gas that they used, ought to be $100, or thereabouts. It’s not.

For example, in 2006, the City spent a total of $167,514 (actual) on “gas and oil,” but took in only $83,200 (actual) in corresponding “gas and oil” revenue (p.2). Looking at another year, in 2007, the City spent a total of $231,037 (actual), and took in $83,200. So, for 2007, the actual “gas and oil” revenue to the City was $83,200, yet the 2007 actual amount spent for “gas and oil” was $231,037. Increased cost (represented by the amount the City spent) should track with increased reimbursement (represented by the amount received), but the City received the same round number each year. Going line by line through the actual expenditure of each departmental budget, the police spent $36,000; fire, $10,499; buildings and grounds, $68,966; and, “miscellaneous,” $115,572. The total of these four line items was $230,937, not $83,200.

We are wondering why there is a discrepancy between actual amounts spent at the departmental level and the corresponding value in the revenue column. Capraro met with Comptroller Tara Clark to review the results of the FOIL request and to get answers to these questions. While the Comptroller was extremely cooperative, we never really got to the bottom of the discrepancies, so we will keep working with City staff to sort them out.

In fact, the records we FOILed reveal other sorts of gaps and curiosities. In September 2005, and from late 2007 through early 2008, there were big jumps in the price of diesel; for gas, the increase was slow and steady, but the price of gas did rise dramatically that August from $1.63 to $2.59 per gallon. From August, 2005, to December, 2005, City records show “pump not registering” and so departments were charged for only “average” use. Actual usage, by department, for that period has never been ascertained.

Then there’s all sorts of City vehicles being driven home by City staff. According to the City Comptroller, City department “supervisors” and their assistants are allowed to use a City owned vehicle for transportation to and from work. Those vehicles, too, fill it up at the City pump.

So, if a City worker has a City vehicle and is allowed to take the vehicle home, and say home is 20 miles away, that’s a commute of 40 miles a day, 5 days a week, or 200 miles per week. At 20 miles per gallon, that’s about 10 gallons of gas a week, and at $3.00 a gallon, that’s $30 per week, times 50 weeks a year, the bill to the taxpayers runs about $1,500, for that one worker.

We note the Mayor of Rochester has recalled numerous City-owned vehicles used by workers to commute, at a substantial savings to Rochester tax payers. This not only saves the City money, but helps employees by saving them the headache of filling out cumbersome IRS documents related to calculating this benefit as income. The IRS requires that take-home vehicles be calculated as ‘compensation’ and therefore be considered with regard to taxation. To fail to report such use is a serious offense.

Finally, there is use of the City pump by non-City agencies-- the Housing Authority and B.I.D. As far as we have been able to determine, this practice goes back many years. Question is, why are they allowed to fill it up at the City pump? It’s apparently a good deal for them. Gas is cheaper for them and they have no overhead to worry about, including maintaining facilities, ordering product, billing etc. But why is the City favoring those agencies and why is the City picking up the tab for the overhead? And, by the way, who is keeping track of the gas budgets on their end, in their own organizations?