Houston would ramp up spending on its sewer system by $2 billion over 15 years under a proposed deal with state and federal regulators that is expected to produce higher water bills as soon as next year.

The Environmental Protection Agency has long been concerned that Houston's cracked, clogged or flooded sewer pipes spill waste into yards and streets hundreds of times each year, contaminating local streams in violation of the Clean Water Act. Eighty percent of area waterways fall short of water quality standards for fecal bacteria.

Rather than sue the city over these long-running problems, the EPA initiated negotiations six years ago, hoping to produce a “consent decree” specifying projects and procedures Houston would use to reduce spills by upgrading pipes, improving maintenance and educating the public on how to avoid clogging the city’s more than 6,000 miles of sewers.

Mayor Sylvester Turner’s staff now are briefing City Council members on the terms of the proposal, which could reach a council vote in April. The mayor said in a brief interview Friday he wanted to speak with all council members before discussing details of the deal publicly, but four people who received the briefings confirmed the deal’s length and projected cost. EPA officials declined to comment.

How much residents’ water bills would rise remains hazy. The city will soon begin a rate study, as it does every five years, that will incorporate the consent decree and other factors and suggest new rates to take effect in July 2020. Turner said rates would stay well within EPA guidelines designed to avoid burdening poor residents, though a 2016 Houston Chronicle analysis showed significant rate hikes would still comply with that framework.

Councilman Greg Travis said he was told the decree would add 4 percent to rates each year of the agreement, resulting in a more than 70 percent increase by the end of the 15-year term. It’s unclear whether that figure included assumptions about inflation and population growth, which drive automatic rate increases each spring. Some other cities under comparable decrees, including San Antonio, will double their rates during their agreements.

Still, the mayor stressed that the projected overall cost of the deal is “substantially less” than the $5 billion to $7 billion the EPA was demanding in the Obama administration’s final year. City officials made an anti-regulation argument to the Trump administration — “You cannot run our city from D.C., and you can’t impose on us costs that the people themselves have to bear” — and it succeeded, Turner told the West Houston Association at a luncheon last week.

“We’ll finally move forward with something that’s in the best interest of the city of Houston, something that will not cost us nearly as much, and something I believe will be the best deal that any city has received anywhere in the country,” Turner told the crowd.

While the lower cost would mean more modest rate hikes, it’s not necessarily the right result, said Lauren Ice, an Austin attorney representing Bayou City Waterkeeper. That Houston nonprofit announced last summer it would sue Houston under the Clean Water Act if regulators didn’t curtail the city’s sewer spills. In response, EPA and state regulators sued the city last September and got a judge’s approval to pause the case while talks concluded.

“Bayou City Waterkeeper has fully expected that the consent decree will constitute a big number, something in the ballpark of $5 billion, just because it’s a very much needed investment to make up for decades of under-investment, especially in poor communities and communities of color,” Ice said. “It’s difficult to say what a rumored $2 billion over 15 years might actually represent, but that seems to fall short of what’s needed to really bring Houston into compliance with the Clean Water Act.”

Several council members said they viewed the proposal as a reasonable outcome for a difficult situation.

“It’s like we’re tied up on a post and the EPA is going to shoot us: We can either agree with the EPA and live, or disagree with the EPA and die,” said Councilman Mike Knox. “We’ve got to deal with it. We can’t have sewage running around everywhere.”

Councilman Greg Travis echoed that.

“We’ve allowed our infrastructure to go so long —not just our roads but our water pipes and our sewer pipes — it’s a problem over the last 40 years, and the bill is now coming due,” he said.

Brent Fewell, a consultant and former EPA assistant administrator, said $2 billion is a lot to absorb, even for a city of Houston’s size.

“No doubt rates are going to go up. But there’s been a greater sensitivity to the issue of affordability — as rates go up, it impacts many of those who can’t afford it the most,” Fewell said. “Hopefully they can focus on the areas of greatest need.”

According to briefing materials provided to council members, the deal would prioritize nine problem areas, with the city assessing and improving seven of them in the first decade of the agreement.

Workers also would annually assess each location where a large spill or at least three spills had occurred, as well as each area scheduled for routine pipe replacements, to determine whether larger pipes needed to be installed, and would increase its count of “smart manholes” from 300 to 3,000. That term refers to remote sensors that detect when water levels rise in a pipe, suggesting a blockage.

The city also would commit to clean and inspect its 127,000 manholes and 5,500 miles of gravity-driven pipes every decade, to carry out preventative cleaning in problem areas, to develop a plan to respond more quickly to spills, and to continue its program to educate residents not to pour grease, oil and other fats down the drain.

In addition to paying $4.6 million in penalties to the state and EPA, Houston would put $1.5 million toward replacing low-income homeowners’ private sewer lines that have collapsed, contributing to spills; typically, the city is responsible only for its own pipes and the few feet of private pipe within its right of way. As future spills occur, penalties that would be paid to the EPA will instead be funneled into replacing poor residents’ pipes.

A Chronicle analysis in 2016 showed the neighborhoods most likely to feel the consequences of the city’s sewer struggles were disproportionately home to low-income and minority residents.

Several council members said they were told Kashmere Gardens would be one recipient of this program, which Fewell praised for being structured in “a pretty creative” way.

Kashmere Gardens Super Neighborhood Council president Keith Downey said sewer problems don’t dominate discussion at civic club gatherings, but are an intermittent nuisance.

“In our community, we have flooding, and with that flooding comes a number of issues, and one is backup of sewer lines,” he said. “Money is needed for infrastructure repairs. This town is getting older, not younger.”

Houston's sewers have lagged since the city's first postwar boom and never have caught up.

Whatever sewage treatment plants could not handle in the 1960s was dumped into the bayous, making Houston for decades the region’s single worst water polluter.

State or federal decrees in the 1970s, 1990s and 2000s prompted enormous investments in new pipes and plants, and at times restricted Houston's pace of development until new treatment facilities were built. As recently as 2001, Public Works did not know what most of its sewer pipes were made of, and acknowledged less than a tenth were up to modern standards.

Today, 40 percent of pipes were built after 2000, and another quarter were laid in the 1990s. Still, Houston’s rate of spills per mile of pipe far exceeds the national average.

Jason Iken, a wastewater consultant who ran the city’s sewer system from 2011 to 2017, said because past decrees focused on replacing old pipes, this round of talks extended to how the system is operated and maintained.

Having a prescriptive agreement in place, Iken said, will not encourage Public Works to innovate — “‘This is how we’ve always done it’ is a syndrome that has to be addressed,” he said — but he said the decree likely will benefit Houstonians.

“The average resident will see improvement during wet weather events at their particular address,” Iken said. “If you’re having consistent issues with flushing, the routine process of pipe maintenance will address those, and the daily routine will be faster in customer response because of the agreement.”

Jasper Scherer contributed to this report.

mike.morris@chron.com

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