SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The U.S. Supreme Court's taking up a legal fight between San Francisco and the federal Environmental Protective Agency - Protection Agency. At issue is the city's sewer system and what it does when it gets overwhelmed. Member station KQED's Katherine Monahan takes it from there.
PETER SNIDER: Today's a pretty nice day. You can see clearly a few feet into the water.
KATHERINE MONAHAN, BYLINE: Peter Snider sits in front of his houseboat on Mission Creek in San Francisco. Kayakers are paddling by, but Snider says that, especially after heavy rains, some pretty nasty things go floating downstream.
SNIDER: Condoms, [expletive] - actual [expletive], you know - come down - dead fish.
MONAHAN: San Francisco discharges an average of nearly 2 billion gallons of combined stormwater and raw sewage each year into local waters, and Snider says this has been an issue for decades.
SNIDER: Actually, when I first moved down here, I mean, it was - used to be called [expletive] Creek.
MONAHAN: The resulting public health risks are serious, says Sejal Choksi-Chugh, who directs the environmental group San Francisco Baykeeper. It, along with the EPA and California's water board, are suing the city for what they say are repeated violations of the Clean Water Act.
SEJAL CHOKSI-CHUGH: We've seen all kinds of complaints from exposure to raw sewage, including rashes on the skin. Anybody who's swimming in the bay in that area where the discharge is happening, or kayaking, can definitely be impacted by bacteria.
MONAHAN: The lawsuit states that San Francisco has not maintained its sewer system properly.
CHOKSI-CHUGH: They should want to fix this problem, but they really have not understood the scope and the magnitude, and they have not addressed it in an effective and efficient way.
MONAHAN: San Francisco, in turn, is suing the EPA, saying the agency's restrictions on just how much sewage it can discharge are too vague. And that case is going before the U.S. Supreme Court in its next session. The city declined to be interviewed for this story, but said in a statement that it is improving its infrastructure and has reduced the number of spills, but to stop them completely, it said, would cost residents over $10 billion.
DARREN OLSON: What cities are up against, in now having to essentially replumb themselves, is a monumental task.
MONAHAN: Darren Olson is with the American Society of Civil Engineers, where he's on a committee that evaluates infrastructure around the country. He says San Francisco is not alone in this problem. Some of the nation's biggest cities, like New York and Chicago, also have combined sewer systems. That's an older style that runs stormwater and sewage through the same pipes and tends to overflow during heavy rains.
OLSON: As we have more intense storm events that put more physical pressure on these systems, those pipes are more prone to failure.
MONAHAN: But cities often hesitate to take on the cost of fixing this unless regulation makes them, says Camille Pannu. She's a professor at Columbia Law School who researches environmental inequality, including on water issues.
CAMILLE PANNU: If the Supreme Court decides that the EPA doesn't have the authority to require these kinds of sewage system upgrades, then it really does set a standard where you have a lot of cities that are not able to upgrade and are not going to upgrade.
MONAHAN: And Pannu says this goes beyond sewer systems. Currently, the Clean Water Act allows states and tribes to regulate water quality in two ways - one, by setting specific numeric limits on how much pollution can be released, and, two, by setting what's called narrative standards, which describe conditions that the pollution shouldn't create, such as causing the water to be toxic or to have scum floating on it. San Francisco is asking the court to limit when those narrative standards can be enforced or bar them altogether. Trade groups representing industries from mining to pork production have come out supporting the city.
PANNU: I think the reason you're seeing industry kind of pile on is because they're seeing an opportunity to make it harder for regulators to regulate water quality.
MONAHAN: Those groups, meanwhile, say that narrative water quality standards are unclear and leave them exposed to unpredictable fines. The U.S. Supreme Court will decide the case by the end of the coming term.
For NPR News, I'm Katherine Monahan in San Francisco. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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