The Metropolitan District Commission, a quasi-public Greater Hartford water and sewer operator, has agreed to pay a $298,000 fine for pollution violations at its sewage sludge incineration facilities, federal regulators announced Wednesday.
The Environmental Protection Agency said that it and the U.S. Department of Justice had entered into a proposed consent decree with Hartford-based MDC, which would lead to the civil penalty and would also require MDC to come into compliance with federal Clean Air Act emission limits and monitoring requirements.
MDC processes sewage waste at its Hartford facility using three sludge incinerators that reduce the volume of sewage that must be treated. Those incinerators emit pollutants such as mercury, lead, cadmium, dioxins and furans, carbon monoxide, particulate matter and nitrogen oxides, EPA said.
While there are allowable limits for those emissions, an EPA rule holds that any incinerator operator that invests a certain amount of money into facilities, as EPA says the MDC has done, must meet more stringent standards.
“This proposed settlement provides important benefits for communities in and around Hartford,” Deborah Szaro, the EPA’s New England acting regional administrator, said in a statement. “Through enforcement, EPA commits to addressing environmental justice concerns and ensures entities like the MDC comply with clean air regulations to reduce air pollution and continue to improve public health protection.”
MDC said Thursday that it believes it has “a legitimate dispute” over how the EPA is interpreting its regulation, but agreed to the settlement to resolve the matter.
“As a result of the MDC performing capital improvements over the past 50 years that improved operational efficiency and lowered pollutant emissions of its [sewage sludge incinerators], the EPA determined that the MDC’s SSIs must comply with the regulations for ‘new SSIs rather than ‘existing,’ ” MDC said.
“While the “new” regulations have much more stringent emissions limits than the “existing” regulations, the MDC’s SSIs have historically complied with almost all of the more stringent limits,” the agency continued. “Despite already substantially complying, the MDC disputed the EPA’s interpretation of the regulations due to potentially being forced to perform costly upgrades that could have been required under the ‘new’ regulations.”
The agency said it has been engaged with the EPA since it updated the SSI rules in 2016 to resolve the dispute. MDC said it believes the settlement is in the best interests of its customers.
This story has been updated to include comments MDC provided Thursday, a day after the EPA announced the civil penalty.
