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NEW BEDFORD — It’s the nation’s most valuable fishing port, but the fish in the harbor aren’t safe to eat.
It’s a home for world-class sailing and boating, but not known for its water quality.
Its miles of beaches are on the same coastline as burning hot tourist destinations, but frequently closed for swimming because of bacteria and sewage overflow.
New Bedford is a city built by the sea — in more ways than one — but historically the city’s success came at the expense of its waterways.
A new bond order advanced in City Council last Thursday will kick off the latest round of work — $70 million in total — for the Whaling City to repair, replace, and improve its water systems: stormwater, wastewater, and lead pipes alike.
After unanimously passing a second reading in City Council last week, the bonds are set for final approval on June 12, which will allow the city to enter the bond market and meet the June 30 deadline to receive state aid. That available aid, however, has been reduced since previous years, according to city officials.
“The city has made tremendous progress over the last 30 years,” Shawn Syde, the city engineer, told the council in a presentation on the work that will take place over the next three to five years. New Bedford’s Department of Public Infrastructure (DPI) has already overseen $134 million in water distribution improvements since 2018, said Syde, plus $220 million more in separating the stormwater and wastewater systems since 2016.
“A lot of folks don’t understand that when you flush the toilet or use the sink in Sassaquin [in New Bedford’s far North End], that wastewater is moved from that end of the city down to the peninsula,” said DPI Commissioner Jamie Ponte. He said that New Bedford has about 300 miles of pipes and maintaining them is “a 24-hour, 365-day process … that requires significant attention and upkeep. It’s pretty marvelous.”
All told, New Bedford has spent about half a billion dollars over the last three decades to make the water system more efficient, to rip the lead pipes out of the ground, and to reduce the sewage runoff into the harbor and Buzzards Bay. And there’s still much more to do.
“All this work is discussed and coordinated with DEP and EPA,” Syde told councilors, referring to the state and federal agencies that regulate pollution and the environment. “They are in lockstep with what we’re attempting to do.”
New Bedford has been responding to federal and state mandates to clean up the waterways, improve the sewer system, and get rid of the lead pipes. However, in this latest round of funding, some of the support from those agencies has been slipping away.
“Typically about 90% of the funding had come from DEP, and about 10% from the city,” Syde said, noting support from the state. “Now it’s about 50-50. We don’t have access to the … money that we once did.”
$38 million for water infrastructure, lead pipe removal
Two bonds were presented to City Council, and the larger bond — $38 million — will address “critical upgrades” to the water distribution system and lead pipe removal.
The majority of that money — $24.9 million — will go to removing the lead pipes that connect older homes and businesses to the city’s water grid. All projects financed by this bond, including various water main replacements and system reinforcements, have been mandated under state and federal laws.
The lead service replacement program has been ongoing in New Bedford for about six years, according to DPI officials. This most recent bond will finance Phase 4 of the lead removal, and those officials are hopeful that a fifth and final phase will extricate the last lead pipes in New Bedford.
Across all phases, the city will remove almost 8,000 lead pipes.
Because of the long process to plan, fund, and execute these projects, several other phases of lead removal are ongoing. Right now, the city is wrapping up Phase 2 — which will take the city to a total of 3,425 removed lead pipes, or 43% progress. Phase 3 is currently “out to bid,” meaning the city is finalizing its contracts and plans — and the completion of this phase will get the city to 5,865 removed lead pipes, or 74% progress.
At the end of Phase 4, the plan now seeking funding through the bond order, 6,965 lead pipes will have been removed, or 87% progress. Work on Phase 4 is projected to be completed in 2029, according to the city’s estimates.
“All the low-hanging fruit has been removed,” said Ponte, the DPI commissioner. In later stages of the lead pipe removal, “it costs more money to get out a smaller discharge” — because the sites may be older, abandoned, or harder to access.
Other projects funded by this bond are for improving the aging water mains — some of which are more than 100 years old. The DPI is coordinating all work on water mains with road improvements, so that roads won’t be dug up twice. Water main improvements and other reinforcements are projected to be completed in 2028.
$32 million for wastewater and stormwater — stopping sewage overflows
Anytime it rains in New Bedford, the century-old sewer system becomes overwhelmed, flowing over its guardrails, and pouring wastewater through 27 approved and monitored “CSO discharges” — combined sewer overflows — into the harbor and Buzzards Bay.
“Are we paying for the sins of our fathers?” asked Ponte. “Yes.”
“Back when they were building it they ran the pipes down to the river,” Ponte said. “Right now the goal of the program is to separate the system” — that is, separating the wastewater pipes from the stormwater pipes. “The more separation we do, the less likelihood of a CSO event.”
DPI officials estimated that the total volume of CSOs has been reduced by close to 90% in the last three decades of work. In 1990, an estimated 3.1 billion gallons of untreated discharge flowed out of the CSO pipes, but that was reduced to approximately 183 million gallons in 2016, according to the Long Term CSO Control Plan, a report from 2017.
Ponte said the city is also working on landscape features to soak up stormwater, including permeable sidewalks, catch-basin cleaning, and planting more trees — “so less water gets into the sewer system.”
Still, the CSO problem requires active, expensive remediation.
Syde described this latest round of capital improvements as addressing “immediate” needs, and cited various state and federal regulations that require all the work being undertaken.
The most expensive portion of these capital improvements, at $12 million, will replace or improve sewers within “the oldest portion of the City’s sewer system,” according to Syde. The priority areas for these improvements include Clark’s Cove and the Upper Acushnet River.
The next most expensive improvement, the River Road sewer project, will replace large portions of the sewer system near the Acushnet River for $11 million. Syde told city councilors that this project has risen on the priority list and will become more expensive if delayed further. The project will also include repaving and reconstructing the roadway and improving the Howard Avenue pumping station.
The City Council is on track to give final approval for all the work in both water-related bonds in its next full meeting, on June 12, which will meet the timeline to qualify for state aid — and avert the mistake the council made in 2021, when the body missed that deadline.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
The city spent over $200 million to fix the cso’ s and built a brand new modern sewer treatment plant on fort rodman back in the 90s. We had this problem well under control. We had shellfishing again in the outer harbor and in clarks cove. Now every thing is closed to shellfishing in fairhaven new bedford and dartmouth.Why was this not maintained .Water quality standards were increased for shellfishing also. Is dartmouth and fairhaven doing its part to clean things up. It just never ends.
Don’t you think that our taxes have gone up enough that you have to keep doing these things and keep raising our taxes for what for nothing.
Cities don’t just sit on taxes. They’re used to cover annual expenses. Municipal bonds are issued to cover the cost of specific large scale projects like ones described in the article. Kind of like how most people are not just sitting on $450,000 to buy a house and have to take out a mortgage loan.