CRWA in the NewsZimmerman: Water restriction is common senseBy Bob Zimmerman, Daily News Transcript Friday, December 2, 2005 Claudia Torrens article ("DEP sets off water fight," Nov. 23) misses key points in the revised water permits being written for towns in the Upper Charles watershed. Torrens suggests that the 15 towns getting revised permits would be restricted to 65 gallons per person per day. She failed to point out, however, that the towns would have two full years to achieve that number, and that the department has developed guidance written into the permits that no enforcement action would be taken against those that achieve a 72 gallons per person per day usage over the next five years. All the towns in the Charles watershed save Lincoln, Wayland, Medfield, Millis and Holliston currently meet that number. Town officials and legislators like State Senator Scott Brown, and Representatives Alice Peisch and David Linsky posture as if these water permits are a bureaucratic boondoggle. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the new permits help us conserve water. We are running out in eastern Massachusetts because of the way we have engineered our water supply and wastewater discharges. Conserving water now will help us begin the switch to decentralized water and wastewater infrastructure over the coming decade, which in turn will save us billions of dollars, and help restore our water environment. If officials and legislators have their way, we will continue to pump the Charles for drinking and irrigation water at levels the river simply cannot sustain. Tributaries to the river are already beginning to dry up. The Charles itself has nothing but wastewater effluent as flow in August and September. Towns like Dedham, Natick, and Needham are spending real money to join the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority to augment their summer water supplies. The added costs to ratepayers to join the MWRA system are evidently not an issue for town officials or legislators. The far more nominal costs of conservation evidently are. Citizens and businesses should not be fooled. It is a huge disservice to you and the environment to pretend that these new permits are not necessary. It is also stunningly shortsighted. Lincoln, by contrast, the town with the highest per capita water use in the watershed, has already started a conservation education campaign. CRWA will continue to work very hard to see that the revised permits are issued. We have carefully documented water resource depletion and environmental harm in over 11 years of research on the river. Nor are we alone in our analysis. The United States Geologic Survey has documented the same problems in extensive work done in the Upper Charles, the Assabet and the Ipswich rivers. Towns like Franklin, Millis, and Holliston participated in the Upper Charles study, and it is certainly disingenuous of them now to suggest that the science surrounding the DEP policy and revised permits is somehow flawed. -- BOB ZIMMERMAN |