When Rehoboth Beach officials looked for land for an alternative disposal site for their municipal sewerage, the coastal real estate market was booming.
They contacted landowner, after landowner and found no one tilling to sell.
So the city proceeded with a proposal to build an ocean outfall, a plan that was supported as the best option in an environmental impact statement recently approved by state environmental officials.
But the non-profit Surfrider Foundation Delaware Chapter disagreed. The organization, in a petition to the state Environmental Appeals Board filed last month, contends that the impact study was based on outdated information on land costs and availability.
A hearing has been set for June 23.
Rehoboth Beach Mayor Samuel Cooper said "it really doesn't come as a big surprise" that the state decision was appealed. "We'll see where this goes."
Cooper said he was unaware that an appeal had been filed or that the board had decided to hear it.
Rehoboth is under a court order to stop discharging treated waste water into Lewes & Rehoboth Canal. City officials settled on the ocean outfall as both the best environmental option and the least costly – estimated at $30 million in 2009 dollars.
Rehoboth Beach residential property owners typically pay $326 annually in sewer fees. With the land application alternative, the cost would have ranged from 1,010 to $1,400 per property owner annually, according to the environmental impact statement.. The estimate cost with the outfall: $635 per residential property.
The burden of getting Rehoboth's treated waste out of the Lewes & Rehoboth Canal has weighed heavily on city and state officials over the last two decades. The city's 3.4-million-gallon-a-day treatment plant is the single largest discharge pipe source of nitrogen and phosphorous in the environmentally sensitive Inland Bays. Once it is removed, it will be the last of 13 that discharged into the bays and an annual source of 17,120 pounds of nitrogen and 1,180 pounds of phosphorous on average a year gone with it.
The Surfrider appeal came days after state environmental officials, in early January, signed off on the city's environmental impact assessment, a massive document that ruled out a series of other discharge options in favor of an ocean outfall. The municipality must still go through the state and federal permitting process.
Delaware's beaches are among the nation's cleanest. Rehoboth Beach received a 5-star award in 2013 from the Natural Resources Defense Council. The award goes to beaches with excellent records for beach swimming water quality.
And while Sussex County and Ocean City, Md. already operate ocean outfalls that have been mostly trouble free, some environmental organizations worried about the proposed location for the Rehoboth outfall and the potential the impact on fish and marine mammals at the nearby Hen & Chicken Shoals, an area that is considered a critical shark pupping area near the entrance to Delaware Bay.
The entire decision to move forward with the Rehoboth outfall was made based on decade-old land prices and availability, said John Doerfler, Vice Chair of the Delaware Chapter.
Doerfler said that the City erroneously concluded that there was not enough nearby land available for land application nor did they look at all the options.
Doefler said the both the Farm Bureau and two private companies that offer wastewater disposal services said their was land available for wastewater disposal.
"The numbers are severely inaccurate," Doerfler said. "That's why we're appealing."
Gregg Rosner, chair for the Surfrider Foundation Delaware Chapter's Water Quality Committee, said that "at the core of Surfrider's mission is coastal conservation and compassionate protection of the ocean environment for surfers, recreational users and all creatures, with whom we share our water planet. . .When you put this pipe into the Ocean, it's no longer a locally controlled issue and solution, it will be subject to the oversight of people based anywhere from Washington D.C. to Portland, Oregon, or wherever else. Who knows! I'd rather know who is responsible for issues affecting me locally."
Reach Molly Murray at 463-3334 or mailto: mmurray@delawareonline.com. Follow her on Twitter @MollyMurraytnj.
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