The Jefferson County Commission on Thursday is set to authorize an agreement with the U.S. Department of the Interior to renew funding for 13 continuous-record stream flow gauging stations.

The county will pay $229,210 in this joint funding agreement.

The agreement, which was moved to Thursday’s commission agenda during the committee meeting on Tuesday, pays for data-collection platforms that provide water quality monitoring of temperatures, specific-conductance and dissolved oxygen at seven of those stations.

“We fund a dozen or more stream-gauging stations across the county,” Environmental Services Director David Denard said. “USGS (U.S. Geological Survey) maintains stream gauges all across the country. We pay basically for a select number of stream gauges. We’ll share on the cost 50%.”

Monitored waterways include Village Creek, Valley Creek, Turkey Creek, Five Mile Creek, Cahaba River and Little Cahaba River.

“Each one of our (water treatment) plants has its own discharge permit and those are issued by ADEM,” Denard said of the Alabama Department of Environmental Management. “They’ll still have a dozen different parameters but they monitor and regulate. It helps us be able to set those and help ADEM have information, too.”

Thursday’s commission agenda also includes a funding agreement with the Alabama Department of Transportation. That is an ATRIP II project grant agreement for the intersection of Grants Mill Road and Alabama 119.

ALDOT will receive $2 million in ATRIP II funds for improvements to that intersection.

The agenda also includes a plan required by the state’s Rebuild Alabama Act. That     act levied an additional excise tax on gasoline, and the county has to submit a plan for its use of the money for maintenance, improvement and construction of roads.

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With his job performance under a microscope, the state’s top environmental regulator has responded to criticism of his handling of a large fish kill on Warrior River tributaries and of 3M Company’s pollution of the Tennessee River.

In a five-page letter sent this month to the Alabama Environmental Management Commission, which oversees the Department of Environmental Management, ADEM Director Lance LeFleur defended the response to those and other actions.

The commission provides oversight for LeFleur’s department and has been taking public comments on his job performance through July.

LeFleur said Tyson Foods Inc. will be held responsible for the large fish kill on the Mulberry and Sipsey forks caused by pollution from one of its chicken processing plants.

Tyson will be paying for the consequences, but it is entitled to a process, LeFleur told Alabama Daily News. “We don’t close them down because of an unintentional discharge,” he said.

Regarding the Tennessee River water quality issue, LeFleur said ADEM is not responsible for handling 3M’s release of pollutants into the Tennessee River. The EPA, he wrote, “does not delegate its authority (under the Toxic Substances Control Act) to any state nor is TSCA information shared with the states.”

LeFleur told Alabama Daily News that his department has “absolutely” done its job in the matter. “I can assure you that the 3M and Tyson situations are receiving ADEM’s full attention,” he wrote in his letter, which also was sent to Gov. Kay Ivey.

The Associated Press recently reported that Ivey expressed concern over the handling of the Tennessee River pollution. She is expected to meet with LeFleur on Aug. 6 to discuss that and other matters.

The director also addressed media criticism about his role in the industrial contamination of soil in north Birmingham. LeFleur said clean-up will be completed “decades earlier” than it would have taken place if ADEM had not opposed the EPA’s proposal to place the area on the National Priorities List for Superfund action.

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Holes are appearing in Alabama’s official safety net for environmental protection.

A consistent loser in recent battles for state funding, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) is seeing delays in enforcing regulations.

It also is seeking to hand off to local governments the primary responsibility for emergency response to environmental accidents.

And its lack of matching funds helped dash hopes for federal clean-up of long-standing industrial contamination in several north Birmingham neighborhoods.

A recent sign of the problems came Feb. 10 with landowner James Hodges’s plea to ADEM’s oversight commission for more timely enforcement of regulations to prevent construction runoff from damaging his cypress wetlands in Houston County.

That opened the door for the Alabama Environmental Management Commission to call attention once again to years of diminished funding for the department’s enforcement activities. Alabama is 49th in the nation in its per capita support.

“Are you ready to pay more taxes (for more enforcement)?” Commissioner Terry Richardson asked at the group’s bimonthly meeting Feb. 10 in Montgomery. “Because that’s what it’s going to take.”

‘Knee high’ sediment in cypress wetlands

James Hodges of the Taylor community in Houston County said contractors working in rural areas may or may not seek an ADEM permit committing them to adequately manage soil runoff. If they don’t get a permit, Hodges said, they may complete the job before anyone notices a problem, such as happened when sediment filled the wetlands “knee high” around his cypresses, which stand in Newton Creek, a tributary of the Little Choctawhatchee River.

Particularly in the state’s rural areas, where a “wild West” attitude often inhibits construction companies from seeking permits, silt fences and other methods of managing such runoff may not be put in place until after the job is complete, he said.

Choctawhatchee Riverkeeper Mike Mullen of Troy told the commission that Hodges’s complaint “is not an isolated incident.” Nonprofit organizations such as his patrol Alabama’s major rivers and creeks to monitor for environmental threats or damages and promote clean-water initiatives.

Mullen later acknowledged that job sites are usually inspected promptly by ADEM after a complaint is made, but enforcement follow-up is often “slow in coming and not sufficient to encourage general compliance, and penalties are not sufficient to deter violators.”

Hodges’s problem was reported to ADEM by Mullen in mid-September after a developer began clearing land for a subdivision in August. ADEM staff inspected the multi-home site two days after the complaint was filed, finding no site registration was posted, no silt fences or other protective methods were being used, and the cypress wetlands area was impacted. A warning letter was sent Sept. 26, giving 10 days to correct the problems and request a permit for the job. A notice of violation was sent Oct. 18. The developer responded to the warning letter on Oct. 19 but did not permit the site until Nov. 29.

By then, the damage to the wetlands was evident, Hodges said.

Tensions flared between ADEM director Lance LeFleur and the two men, Mullen and Hodges. LeFleur denied knowing about Hodges’s complaint.

“You are aware. It’s been brought to your attention, sir,” Hodges responded.

Friction over ADEM Performance

Friction between bureaucracies and advocacy groups is expected, but feelings were ramped up in recent years. Until last month, ADEM was locked in a struggle with environmental groups, including Mullen’s, that formally urged the EPA to strip the department of its authority to implement part of the federal Clean Water Act, in part alleging it was not adequately funded and enforcing regulations.

On Jan. 11, EPA Region IV in Atlanta issued a denial of the advocates’ petitions and allowed ADEM to maintain control. Although the process did identify areas in which ADEM could improve, LeFleur told the commission that the case was costly and his cash-strapped agency could have made “more productive” use of the time and money expended.

In pointed, prepared remarks lasting more than four minutes, LeFleur criticized Mullen for filing “far more complaints than any other individual in the state,” and for filing them directly to ADEM staff rather than through an electronic reporting system. LeFluer’s Prepared Statement.

The director earlier in the meeting had told the commission that ADEM’s inspection and enforcement metrics compared favorably to those of other states in the region.  Metrics measure, for example, rates of inspection of sites and facilities with permits, compared with rates of other states.

But Mullen notes there’s no ADEM staff on the ground searching for the bad guys without permits, particularly for smaller construction jobs in small towns and outside municipal areas.  “There’s a relatively low probability that those violations will be detected and others deterred,” he said.

No regulatory agency, LeFleur said, “can prevent all violations or catch every violator,” and due process requirements are responsible for some of the delay in gaining compliance from contractors.  Mullen “may not be satisfied with the department’s enforcement program; however, his often repeated disparaging characterization of the (program) is without basis, misleading, and demonstrably wrong,” he said.

Commission chair H. Lanier Brown II stepped in to caution the pair to avoid personal exchanges.

He directed LeFleur to seek ways to put more pressure on contractors to have measures to protect adjacent property in place “when the ‘first shovel’ is put in the ground.”

Richardson remarked, “If you want effective follow-through after a complaint is made, you must have the ‘boots on the ground’ to do that. That takes money.” He told Hodges that he has seen similar noncompliant construction at sites in his home region, but “until we have a state legislative body that recognizes it’s time to pony up (more funding), this is what we’ll be faced with.”

Support for ADEM programs may become even more difficult because, he said, “We are facing a federal regime that is liable to reduce some of EPA’s funding (to the state). That’s just going to make matters worse, guys, for enforcement control, action and follow-up. You reach a point when you can’t cut any more. You can’t get blood from a turnip.”

Cuts in State Money

ADEM has seen drastic cuts in its state appropriation over the past few years, with the state contribution dropping from more than $6 million in fiscal year 2008 to $280,000 for FY 2016. The department also was among those required in 2016 to help shore up the state’s General Fund with money from their own budget. ADEM was asked to transfer $1.2 million.

To help cover its shortfalls, ADEM hiked fees three times in recent years – 19% in 2011, 50% in 2013, and 20% in December 2015.  Despite those increases, Alabama ranks 49th in the nation in per capita support from fees and appropriations.  ADEM’s total budget is approximately $152 million for the current fiscal year. About 40% of that total comes from federal grants, almost all from the EPA.

State money pays fees for farms only   

The General Fund contribution to ADEM was increased to $400,000 in the FY 2017 budget, but that entire appropriation is restricted to paying permit fees for the inspection of large poultry, hog and other animal farms under the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation program. The program requires farmers to manage animal waste in environmentally responsible ways to ensure groundwater and water systems are not contaminated by the feedlots.

The CAFO earmark and increases show the muscle of Alabama’s agricultural and business lobby. Alabama Farmers Federation, Alabama Poultry and Egg Association, Business Council of Alabama, and other groups told members of the legislature’s Rural Caucus last August that the burden of increased fees was too great for its members to bear and the state should cover the costs with an appropriation from the General Fund, according to multiple news sources and the transcript of LeFleur’s report to the commission at the time.

CAFO again is expected to be the department’s only General Fund appropriation in the FY 2018 budget, which the legislature is considering in the current session that started Feb. 7.

Richardson and other ADEM leaders, as well as environmental groups, have taken the Legislature to task in the past for not adequately funding the department. In 2015 he questioned whether the department is considered critical to the state, in view of the sparse state funding.

Despite the funding issues, he said, “We’re doing a pretty darn good job with the funding that we’re getting.”

Shifting emergency response?

Inspections and enforcement duties are not the only financially distressed function of ADEM. In August, LeFleur said the department’s emergency response program for oil and hazardous materials spills and other incidents was “inadequately funded.” LeFleur told the commission he was seeking changes in the state’s Emergency Operations Plan to shift responsibilities for primary response to local communities, a process he acknowledged would “place greater financial obligations on local communities.”

The Alabama Emergency Management Agency said in an email that the plan is “in the process of being updated,” but did not specifically reference ADEM’s requested change.

Mitch Reid, Alabama Rivers Alliance program director, said this week, “If ADEM does not have the resources to respond to emergencies, that tells me its bare bones funding has moved over to a deeper problem area.” The nonprofit alliance represents several waterkeeper organizations in the state.

Reid agreed with Richardson that a lack of inspections and enforcement results from the lack of staff in the field to inspect and enforce regulations. “There is money from permit fees and grants from EPA to manage the federal Clean Water Act, but permit fees can only be used for the issuance and renewal of permits. They can pay the staff that looks at paperwork, and visit a site when a permit is reissued – but those fees can’t be used to pay staff to ride around the state looking for the rogue contractors and other bad guys.”

Impact on Birmingham cleanup  

ADEM’s budget woes over recent years are one reason several highly contaminated neighborhoods in northern Birmingham did not make a priority list to be a federal Superfund site in 2014, according to Haley Lewis, staff attorney for Gasp, a nonprofit clean-air education and advocacy group headquartered in Birmingham.

“We were told the required matching funds from the state weren’t going to be available,” Lewis said. “So it is likely the site won’t be listed, which was probably our best chance to get the contamination in the northern Birmingham communities cleaned up.” The area includes North Birmingham, Collegeville, Harriman Park and Fairmont neighborhoods, as well as part of Five Mile Creek and Harriman Park ditch.

LeFleur, despite his objection to the number of complaints filed by Mullen, said he wants private citizens to take up some of the slack resulting from ADEM funding woes. He encouraged everyone to “be our eyes and ears on the ground” and report suspected violations to ADEM’s electronic complaint form, accessible through the “Contact Us” link on the homepage of its website, Alabama Department of Environmental Management.

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The Alabama Rivers Alliance’s program director Mitch Reid said, “Federal money isn’t extra money for us, it’s absolutely fundamental to the maintenance of clean water in Alabama. Any way you look at it, this throws a wrench in the steady state operation of water protection in Alabama.”

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) relies on a suite of grants and contracts from the EPA to carry out its programs in water and air quality, solid and hazardous waste management, and others.

The federal government’s contribution to ADEM is about $60 million, or nearly 40 percent of the department’s $154 million budget, for 2016.

The Alabama legislature budgeted $280,000 from the general fund in 2016, down from $830,000 in 2015, according to Gov. Robert Bentley’s 2017 Executive Budget. The state appropriation  amounts to less than 1 percent of total funds received by ADEM for 2016. Moreover, the General Fund appropriation is earmarked to administer one program, the Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFO) program.

ADEM Budget

Most of the rest of ADEM funding is from permits, fees, and fines earmarked for inspections and other programs. In 2016, in addition to funding ADEM operations, the agency was required to send $1.2 million from fees and permits to the General Fund, the department’s director, Lance LeFleur, said last year in a report to oversight group, the Alabama Environmental Management Commission.

EPA, ADEM Comments  

The EPA’s regional office in Atlanta confirmed Thursday  via email that its staff and the Administration’s transition team are reviewing grants and contracts and the agency is “continuing to award” funding during the review.

EPA Region 4 external affairs officer James Pinckney added, “The goal is to complete the (review) by the close of business on Friday, Jan. 27.”

Lynn Battle, ADEM director for external affairs, said, “Everything is going to be back to normal.”

Nevertheless, Reid said his advocacy group, in response to the potential funding loss, has initiated a program on its website “asking people to contact President Trump and remind him and other elected leaders that clean water is not something we can afford to put off for a couple of months while they get organized.”

Beth Stewart, executive director of the Cahaba River Society, said, “When the Colonial Pipeline incidents happened, EPA was a lead federal responder. EPA contracts with firms to help ensure that these kinds of accidents and leaks don’t become environmental disasters.”  Stewart’s group is a member of the Alabama Rivers Alliance.

Local communities now spill  responders

Last year a lack of resources led ADEM to call on local communities to become the primary responders to oil and hazardous materials emergencies. “The department is continuing to divert costs of its inadequately funded emergency response program to other agencies,” ADE LeFleur reported to the oversight group.

The director said that, to divert costs from ADEM, local governments would be the primary responder to oil and hazardous waste spills under changes he was recommending to the state’s Master Emergency Operations plan.

“When local communities exhaust their emergency response resources they would then contact the State Emergency Management Agency or ADEM for possible additional resources,” LeFleur said, according to his report posted on the ADEM website.

In the nation’s capital, some staffers whose departments are under the freeze order told the New York Times that they remained worried about President Trump’s policies but blamed the transition team’s late start for this week’s reviews and freezes on grant programs.

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Levels of dangerous perfluorocarbon (PFCs) in drinking water continue to bedevil the Gadsden Water Works and Sewer Board.

Two recent samples from the Coosa River, where Gadsden gets its water, tested above the federally recommended long-term level for two specific PFCs, PFOA and PFOS. That prompted the Alabama Department of Public Health (ADPH) yesterday to remind pregnant women, breastfeeding mothers, formula-fed infants, and others sensitive to toxins to consider using alternate sources of drinking water.

Also, the Board has filed suit against more than 30 businesses and industries, many of them carpet mills, for damages from past and present release of toxic chemicals, including PFCs, into the Coosa River. The Coosa is Gadsden Water Board’s source of raw water for the drinking water it processes and distributes.  In the filing, the Board says that its current treatment operation cannot remove the PFCs,  and it would have to install a new system to do so.

ADPH’s State Environmental Toxicologist John Guarisco  said the most recent samples of Coosa River Water used by Gadsden, taken by the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM), showed levels of 84 and 82 parts per trillion (ppt), above the 70 ppt recommended safe maximum level established in an EPA health advisory in May.

“However, the cumulative average of samples taken throughout the summer is at or under 70 ppt,” Guarisco said today. Because the health advisory is based on recommended lifetime levels of the pollutants, averaging sample results over at least a month is appropriate, he added.

“We are not sure whether these recent higher levels of PFOA and PFOS are due to seasonal drought or technical details, or just a strange blip in results,” Guarisco said. ADEM will continue to test the Gadsden water regularly, and ADPH will make additional recommendations if results change, according to an ADPH news release Tuesday, Sept. 20.

Guarisco said his department issued the news release because “concentrations confirmed to be consistently above 70 ppt are subject to the EPA recommendations listed in the health advisory.” Sampling of the Gadsden drinking water supply will continue, he said.

Report from Centre

The news release made no reference to the Centre Water Works and Sewer Board, which also has been under summer-long sampling program for PFOA and PFOS, but David Garrett, general manager, said concentrations of PFOA and PFOS have not reached the elevated levels found in the Gadsden system.

“We’ve averaged right at 70 ppt for the last few weeks,” Garrett said. He noted that drought conditions have plagued east and north Alabama in recent months, which might increase the concentration of pollutants in the river water. “The plan is to continue monitoring the levels (of PFCs) through the change in seasons and see how more rainfall will affect their concentration.”

The Centre system has hired an engineering consultancy firm to help develop a proposal for alternative filtration in case that becomes necessary, he said.

Average levels of pollutants PFOA and PFOS in the drinking water of the Gadsden and Centre water works systems were at or below the EPA-advised level in the month of July, officials of those facilities reported earlier.

Some individual samples for both Centre and Gadsden water systems exceeded the health advisory level, but the averages for the month were below the limit (of 70 parts per trillion).  The advised level is for lifetime exposure so concentrations are averaged from weekly samples collected by ADEM to get a monthly measure.

Sampling of the water continued through August on a weekly basis.  Sampling and testing on the two Coosa River systems “probably will go on for a year,” according to David Garrett, general manager of the Centre Water Works and Sewer Board.

PFCs are man-made chemicals that resist heat, oil, stains, grease, and water. Found in products such as nonstick cookware, carpet protection products, firefighting foams, and waterproof clothing, they have been linked to cancer, endocrine disruption, and other health problems.

Search for Solutions

While testing continues, Garret said, officials from the Alabama Department of Environmental Protection (ADEM) have begun meeting with counterparts at the Georgia Environmental Protection Division and the federal Environmental Protection Agency about the concentration of PFOAs and PFOSs in the Coosa River Basin. Before they were voluntarily phased out by industry some 10 years ago, the dangerous compounds were used by carpet makers on the Coosa River in northwestern Georgia, but the agencies will also look for possible new sources, Garrett said.

Both Garrett and Mike Lankford, superintendent of environmental services of the Gadsden Water Works and Sewer Board, said their systems are evaluating possible long-term solutions to reducing the levels of the contaminants and have hired consulting engineers to help with that process. Already, both systems have altered their water treatment methods to lower the concentrations. The two water systems met August 16 with ADEM officials to discuss treatment options and next steps.

Lankford said filtration with granular, activated carbon and other, newer methods are possible options for the future that are being evaluated. “There are very few things that have the positive effect of reducing (the contaminants),” he said. “We’re running through the gamut of choices. We want to be good stewards for the water system and the environment and make sure we’re doing the right thing that fixes the problem permanently, and you can’t do that without fully vetting each option.”

The water systems have had to respond rapidly in the three months since issuance of the new EPA health advisory that set the 70 ppt standard. Previous levels advised were seven times more and were for short-term exposure.

Initially eight water systems were reported to have concentrations that were over the new advised level. Five were quickly removed from the list as they were erroneously listed or switched to another water supplier. The Gadsden and Centre systems, as well as the West Morgan-East Limestone (WMEL) Water Authority on the Tennessee River, are still dealing with this problem. WMEL plans a temporary GAC filtration fix, with plans to install a more expensive, permanent filtration system later.

A recent Harvard study found that Alabama was surpassed by only three other states in the frequency that compounds like PFOA and PFOS were detected at the level of 70ppt or higher in drinking water supplies. Only California, New Jersey, and North Carolina had more frequent detections. The study was based a nationwide EPA monitoring program from 2013-2015 that found unsafe levels of the dangerous chemicals in the drinking water of 33 states affected more than 6 million people and may be as high as 100 million, authors said.

While the toxins were once used extensively by carpet makers on the upper Coosa River, the 3M and Daikin industries in Morgan County and the BASF (formerly Olin) chemical plants in Washington County on the Tombigbee River also have been identified as origin points for the substances. These contaminants also are associated with the number of military fire training areas and the number of wastewater treatment plants in each watershed.

The WMEL Water Authority filed federal lawsuits last year against 3M and another Decatur chemical manufacturer, Daikin, alleging the companies discharged chemicals that “are not effectively treated by conventional wastewater treatment plant processes” upstream from their intake on the Wheeler Reservoir. The nonprofit environmental advocacy group Tennessee Riverkeeper also has filed suit against 3M, Decatur Utility, and others seeking remediation for landfills and disposal facilities which it says are still leaching contaminants into the river.

Mark Martin, an attorney for the Riverkeeper, said contaminated material travels on “a toxic merry-go-round.” He said “[PFCs] leaching from the landfill goes to the wastewater treatment plant. What is not released into the river as liquid waste ends up as de-watered sludge containing the chemicals. The sludge is pumped out of Decatur’s treatment plant, which does not have the means to remove the chemicals, and goes back to the landfill.”

It’s not a fully contained cycle, Martin said. The compounds escape in liquid waste discharged back into the river, the landfill liners are leaking chemicals into the groundwater supplies despite the landfill efforts to pump out the leachate, and the community is exposed to PFOAs and PFOSs that escape from trucks transporting them to and from landfills and the treatment plant, he said.

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