Harrisburg cares about the Chesapeake Bay

Since 2013, Capital Region Water in Harrisburg, Pa., a financially distressed city on the banks of the Susquehanna River, has invested more than $110.7 million in capital projects to rebuild our communities, repair aging infrastructure and improve the health of local waterways.

Over the next 20 years, we will spend approximately $315 million more as part of our City Beautiful H2O Program to continue work to reduce combined sewer overflows, address localized flooding and runoff, and meet federal and state clean water requirements.

So the notion that Capital Region Water is somehow falling down on the job, as a recent Environmental Integrity Project report claims, is entirely unfair and inaccurate (“Pa. capitol pumps waste directly into Chesapeake Bay’s biggest tributary,” Sept. 5).

Capital Region Water completed a $40 million biological nutrient removal upgrade to our Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility in 2016. We subsequently demonstrated that the facility, which employs the most cutting-edge treatment processes in the region, can reduce total nitrogen in the outflowing water to the limit of treatability to better protect the Susquehanna River.

We continue to further improve the facility as evidenced by an additional $15 million investment in screening and anaerobic digester rehabilitation projects undertaken since the biological nutrient removal upgrade. And planning and design are underway for an additional $20 million in projects over the next few years.

Since 2014, Capital Region Water has repaired 85 sinkholes created by sewer pipe failures that previously had been ignored because of a legacy of deferred maintenance by previous city officials. More work is planned. Fixing old, cracked pipes reduces leakage that leaches into waterways.

Finding creative ways to manage stormwater and polluted runoff is a priority. Capital Region Water is transforming vacant lots into green spaces to manage stormwater from surrounding streets, installing rain gardens and other stormwater infiltrating features in community parks, and managing stormwater with street-level planters to provide traffic calming.

To expand on these efforts, Capital Region Water has proposed a stormwater fee on impervious surfaces to control runoff and combined sewer overflow events. The fee will raise about $5 million annually in dedicated funds specifically for stormwater operations and more projects like those noted here.

No one denies the challenges of maintaining and upgrading infrastructure that is more than a century old in some places, or in finding ways to pay for the work in a city where nearly one of every three residents lives below the poverty line. Harrisburg is not alone in this respect.

For all its failures, the report was right on one account: There is no easy solution and there is no cheap fix. More certainly needs to be done. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore the good work and significant investments being made today.

These problems didn’t surface overnight; they won’t be fixed overnight. But the investments we are making now are cleaning up local rivers and streams and having a direct effect on efforts to improve the health of the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed.

Charlotte Katzenmoyer, Harrisburg, Pa.

The writer is chief executive officer of Capital Region Water.

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