Understanding Inequities in Access to Wastewater Systems, with Maura Allaire

Notable Quotes

• Climate change heightens the risk of septic-system failure: “The reality in the United States is that septic systems fail at alarming rates because of a lack of upkeep or challenging soil conditions and weather. This is concerning, since the issue might grow in the future with aging systems, more intense precipitation, and sea level rise.” (3:38)
• Hyperlocalization of wastewater management can limit access: “Wastewater and water are unlike any other utility sectors. We don’t have widespread issues anymore with households lacking electricity. This is because wastewater and drinking water are highly localized, while other utility services are provided regionally … The majority of US households without piped water or piped sewer are in urban areas located right next door to centralized systems. This means that access isn’t a concern just for rural areas—we have underserved folks in urban areas, as well.” (10:42)
• Regionalization can help expand access to effective wastewater treatment: “Regionalizing wastewater planning could shift us away from hyperlocalized services. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel for this. We could make use of existing regional councils that bring together multiple counties and cities.” (19:00)

Top of the Stack

• The Sum of Us by Heather McGhee
• Waste: One Woman’s Fight Against America’s Dirty Secret by Catherine Coleman Flowers

The Full Transcript

Daniel Raimi: Hello, and welcome to Resources Radio, a weekly podcast from Resources for the Future. I'm your host, Daniel Raimi. Today, we talk with Dr. Maura Allaire, an assistant professor of water equity in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University.

Maura is an expert on a variety of issues related to water equity. Today, I'll ask her to help us understand how and why some people in the United States don't have access to safe wastewater systems. Wastewater is a topic that many of us, especially folks living in cities, don't think about very often. But in a surprisingly large part of the United States, a mix of technological, geological, and economic factors leads to ineffective wastewater treatment, which in turn introduces households to serious health risks. Maura will help us understand each of these issues and how climate change may exacerbate the risks in today's episode. Stay with us.

Maura Allaire from Arizona State, welcome to Resources Radio.

Maura Allaire: Thanks so much for having me.

Daniel Raimi: It is a pleasure to have you on the show, Maura. As you might know if you've listened to the show before, we ask all of our guests how they got interested in working on environmental topics in the first place—whether that inspiration came earlier in life or later in life. What drew you into this line of work?

Maura Allaire: The environment has been my calling for quite some time. Starting in the fourth grade, I volunteered nearly every weekend with my town's trail crew maintaining hiking trails and recreation areas. After undergrad and majoring in economics and geology, I worked in Ghana for a nonprofit assessing clean water availability and living for a year in a rural community. There was an eye-opening experience realizing that barriers to clean water were largely economic and political. I've been focused on water governance and policy ever since.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting. Where did you grow up? Where were the trails that you were working on as a kid?

Maura Allaire: I was in New England, in the central New England hills.

Daniel Raimi: Beautiful. It's great to know that background. It's really interesting. You've been working on these issues for such a long time.

Today, we're going to talk about your line of work that focuses on access to wastewater infrastructure, in particular. It would be great if we could just start with some basics, because we haven't talked about wastewater much on the show before. Let's start with a question that is going to center us for the rest of the conversation, which is, When households are not connected to municipal water and wastewater services, what options do they have to manage the wastewater that gets produced in their homes?

Maura Allaire: For households that are not connected to centralized systems—this is nearly 25 percent of households in the United States, and that's nearly double the portion not served by public water systems. Without access to centralized utilities, households are left to manage their own wastewater. The vast majority of those rely on septic systems, which involves a septic tank for primary treatment and a drain field for additional attenuation. These systems can perform well if they're designed to meet the soil and hydrologic conditions they're in. Also, homeowners need to keep up with the maintenance. The reality in the United States is that septic systems fail at alarming rates because of a lack of upkeep or challenging soil conditions and weather. This is concerning, since the issue might grow in the future with aging systems, more intense precipitation, and sea level rise.

Oversight of these decentralized systems is limited. Federal wastewater regulations do not apply. Each state sets its own standards for septic system construction, and many county public health departments require inspections when a property is sold. But in between those sales, we don't know how systems are performing. If a household lives in a place where conventional septic isn't suitable, then expensive advanced treatment would be needed. But those systems can cost well over $10,000. Those unable to afford this are left without treatment options, and that can force households to rely on systems that we might only imagine in the Global South. These include cesspools and straight pipes. This is plastic piping that carries raw wastewater away from homes but discharges it directly to the land surface or surface water. This is certainly a nationwide challenge.

Reasons why access to safe wastewater would be important are that, too often, it's drinking water that attracts attention while wastewater is left aside. Yet, if we're not adequately treating wastewater, it comes back to haunt us. Proper treatment has direct benefits to those who have it, but also community-wide benefits. We, unfortunately, do not have universal access to safely managed wastewater in the United States. For example, in central Alabama and the Black Belt region, too many folks are not connected to centralized infrastructure. The individual septic systems they rely on fail in the shrink-swell clay soil, and hookworm infections have been found in children and adults. This shouldn't be happening—certainly not in the United States.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting. There’s just one term you use that I would love for you to define, and I'm displaying my ignorance as a city boy here with this question. You used the term “drain field”—what is a drain field, and what does it do to the wastewater that's already gone through the primary treatment system?

Maura Allaire: Sure. It's really a pipe or a series of pipes that are perforated with holes in them that allow wastewater to slowly percolate into the soil over time. The idea then is that this is wastewater that has first received primary treatment, and a septic tank can then slowly be released into the environment where natural processes can further remediate the wastewater.

Daniel Raimi: Great. That makes sense. You need some minimum amount of land to distribute the wastewater across, I'm guessing.

Maura Allaire: Absolutely. That's a great point, too, because besides not having adequate soil conditions, you also need adequate space. The reality is, with greater density being built up in places that have relied on septic for a long time, this can exacerbate failure, as well.

Daniel Raimi: Right. You mentioned the Black Belt in Alabama. If memory serves, that term refers to the characteristics of the soil rather than the demographics of the population, although there's some overlap there, right?

Maura Allaire: Absolutely. It's part of the broader Fertile Crescent region in the south, and the clay soil there is such that … It is a soil type that swells during rainfall and shrinks when rainfall is not occurring. So, these are not conditions that are suitable for conventional septic systems.

Daniel Raimi: Right. What are some of the other parts of the country that might face this challenge in an acute way? Is it lots of rural places where there's a lot of poverty, or is it more specific to certain regions of the United States?

Maura Allaire: The most underserved communities are those left without any wastewater treatment at all. Examples can be found on Tribal lands in the South, Appalachian communities … Over a third of Navajo Nation residents face plumbing poverty. This is likely the largest concentration of people living without running water in the country. Straight pipes have been documented in several states in the South, but also Appalachian regions. In the Southwest—where I'm based—there are colonias near the United States-Mexico border. Up until the '90s, it was legal for developers to create subdivisions in locations outside of city boundaries without public infrastructure. Many colonias still lack basic sanitation. A more prevalent issue is not absence of wastewater treatment, but how well those systems function. We do not know the full scope of this issue nationwide, but we do know failing septic systems affect a wide range of communities, and these can range from colonias to mobile home parks and even to wealthy second-home enclaves.

Besides regional examples, one governance phenomenon that is unique to the United States that can shape infrastructure access is that the United States is one of the only countries in the world with large populations living outside of city boundaries in unincorporated areas. These are not only rural communities. Unincorporated areas can be in the middle of major cities; for example, Little Haiti in Florida. Although the community is physically surrounded by Miami, it's not politically within city bounds. And over a third of the US population lives in unincorporated areas. A major problem for these communities is they're not represented by a local municipal government. Instead, they're represented by county governments, but these have less planning power, and they have fewer options for generating revenue.

This exclusion from local government can happen through underbounding, which is when municipalities selectively expand their boundaries based on neighborhood income or race. This is how, in the United States, we have communities on the edges of cities that lack municipal voting rights and can be excluded from infrastructure. At the same time, wastewater and water are unlike any other utility sectors. We don't have widespread issues anymore with households lacking electricity. This is because wastewater and drinking water are highly localized, while other utility services are provided regionally. There are only 3,000 electricity providers in the country, but over 16,000 sewer utilities, and the majority of US households without piped water or piped sewer are in urban areas located right next door to centralized systems. This means that access isn't just a concern for rural areas—we have underserved folks in urban areas, as well.

Daniel Raimi: That is so interesting. I would love to ask you more questions about the factors that might lead a city to expand or not expand into those peripheral areas. I think we actually have time for that. Can you say a little bit more about that? Why would a city not want to expand to cover the communities that might be adjacent to them and bring them under the umbrella of the city water or wastewater system?

Maura Allaire: Absolutely. Besides historical legacies of marginalization, we also encounter arguments municipalities use in terms of cost-benefit analysis—how much it is going to cost the city to incorporate an area just outside its boundaries and extend utility services to this community, versus how much is the city going to get in return in terms of a tax base. You can quickly see how municipalities can argue that incorporating certain areas might not pass a simplified cost-benefit analysis that only includes costs and benefits to the municipality itself and not the broader region. It's because we're doing this hyperlocalized planning, especially when it comes to water and wastewater.

Daniel Raimi: I see. The city's not taking into account the social benefits that would accrue from extending these systems. They're just looking at the financial raw numbers.

Maura Allaire: Yeah, great point there. Certainly not social benefits to folks who are outside the city.

Daniel Raimi: All right. We've talked a little bit about the cost to a municipality of extending services to peripheral communities. You also mentioned that it can cost $10,000 in some places to install certain types of septic systems. Can you say a little bit more about the cost of households or maybe communities that are near municipal systems but are not able to access those municipal systems? How much does it cost for them to install and maintain different options of wastewater systems?

Maura Allaire: Cost is certainly another critical issue. Conventional septic systems can roughly cost $5,000. That's a ballpark estimate and depends on local conditions. But as we mentioned, conventional septic isn't suitable in all locations. For example, not in areas with clay soil and not in areas with a high water table. In those locations, advanced treatment might be needed. We mentioned that $10,000 figure, and anyone who can't afford that is left with a subpar system. Their choice would be between a conventional septic system that's prone to failure or foregoing treatment.

We need to consider appropriate solutions and ask what technology choice is a good fit for a particular community. Sewer lines could be extended to communities nearby existing systems. Those extensions cost somewhere on the order of $100 per foot, and improved septic systems might be the best choice for isolated households far from city bounds.

One option that's emerging in the United States is neighborhood-scale modular systems. These systems are a paradigm shift away from the stark choice between expensive centralized sewer or single household septic. By connecting multiple households together to a treatment unit, costs can be shared, and that can offer affordable bills for households and a viable operation for the utility. But a big policy question is who should be responsible for managing decentralized wastewater—whether it's a neighborhood-scale system or a household-scale system. We know that placing the burden on individuals hasn't worked nationwide, but how can we move the needle, and who will communities trust? Will it be local county government, a private provider, or a community-based organization? The jury is still out on this question.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting, too. I want to ask you more about policy in just a second. First, there's a basic question that I realized I failed to ask you earlier, which is what does it mean for a septic system to fail? What happens physically to the system, and then what is the result out in the environment?

Maura Allaire: Great question. There are actually two types of failure. One type of failure is infrastructure failure. Perhaps the septic tank itself has a leak or has become compromised structurally in some way. This can cause direct release of untreated or not fully treated wastewater into the environment. Another way that septic systems can fail is termed hydraulic failure. This can be if the water table rises, or perhaps there's a heavy rainfall event that then causes the drain field to be overwhelmed and no longer have wastewater slowly percolating into the soil. That could be something that a natural attenuation process could handle, but all of a sudden you just have a lot of water either going directly into the ground or it could rise to the surface, and then you could have standing ponds of poorly treated wastewater right in people's backyards.

Daniel Raimi: Got it. Let's talk a little bit about policy. This is a huge question to ask. I'm sorry for asking such a broad question, but what is the appropriate role of policy here, and what's the level of government where policy really needs to be developed and deployed to address these problems? You mentioned the importance of local governments, cities, and counties. What's the role here for state governments, for Tribal governments, and even for the federal government to support more equitable outcomes for people who don't have access to these systems that are essential for their health?

Maura Allaire: That's certainly the big question in wastewater. Overall, regardless of the level of policy, I think we're in need of policies that can change the current paradigm of wastewater infrastructure being pushed to the most local levels of government. For the one in five households not connected to centralized sewer, we can do better to ensure individuals are not left on their own.

Regionalization is front and center in water-policy discussions. For drinking water, conversations revolve around consolidating centralized systems and management, but wastewater is different. We have many more people not connected to centralized systems. So then, we need to think about planning and participatory governance, especially for those not represented by a city government. Regionalizing wastewater planning could shift us away from hyperlocalized services. We don't need to reinvent the wheel for this. We could make use of existing regional councils that bring together multiple counties and cities.

More than 500 councils exist across the country, and at the same time, we could ask cities to do more to address wastewater disparities that exist just outside their boundaries. California requires city general plans to assess the infrastructure needs of unincorporated communities nearby, and California gives a voice to unincorporated communities by creating advisory roles for them on county boards of supervisors.

There is quite a bit of activity at the state and local level. Until recently, the federal government has not invested significantly in wastewater infrastructure. For decades, federal funding amounted to only 4 percent of spending each year on water and wastewater utility infrastructure, and federal policy could play a much larger role. Although septic systems aren't regulated by the Clean Water Act, US Environmental Protection Agency funding can support transitions from septic to sewer.

All too often, federal funds support centralized sewers that're run by municipalities, because unincorporated communities face barriers to funding. A lot of those applications require a management entity to pay upfront construction costs, and there's other federal programs that target rural communities and unincorporated communities located in rural areas. But this misses the sizable populations just outside of city boundaries. There are a lot of efforts to make federal funding more accessible, and additional progress can certainly be made. Some states have come up with ways to address communities that are next door to city lines. Arizona—my home base—is the only state that allows county governments to initiate annexation of unincorporated areas that are surrounded by a city. Becoming part of a city can then expand infrastructure. Some Arizona counties assist unincorporated residents with financing connection fees to nearby sewer lines, and that addresses the affordability issue for new connections.

Daniel Raimi: Those are such interesting examples, and they make me wonder a little bit about the politics of this. When a city considers extending out to a neighboring area, is there sometimes opposition from folks within the city who don't want the expansion to happen? You mentioned the lack of political power that the neighboring communities might have. I'm curious what types of political dynamics might be going on within the city itself before or as it considers an expansion?

Maura Allaire: Absolutely. A lot of these discussions can be very politically fraught. Existing municipal residents will often voice their concerns in terms of finance—who's going to pay for these extensions, especially if there's concerns about communities not being able to pull their own weight in terms of what it's going to cost for the extensions, and what they're going to get back for property tax revenue and the overall tax base.

Daniel Raimi: Are these extensions typically paid for through the property-tax base, or are they paid for through fees, or is it a mix of the two?

Maura Allaire: All of the above. This raises the affordability issue, because a lot of times the burden can actually be placed on those who are new connections to the system—they're forced to pay the full up-front cost of connection with largely no financing options. Some states are addressing that issue, either providing financing options to households who are new connections, or actually, in the case of North Carolina, there are restrictions on how much those connection fees can be, and the subsequent ongoing monthly rates in North Carolina are restricted to the cost of service. There can't be a markup for being originally outside of a municipality boundary.

Daniel Raimi: That's super interesting. One last question, Maura, before we go to our Top of the Stack segment, which is about climate change, which you've alluded to earlier. In North Carolina, which you just mentioned—there's been this amazing amount of rainfall associated with Hurricane Helene, and we've seen enormous impacts from that. That's just one example of a storm that may have been made worse by climate change. As we look towards the future, as climate impacts become more severe, what are the types of impacts that you worry about the most when it comes to maintaining safe wastewater systems, whether it's in the form of septic or municipal?

Maura Allaire: That is a great question. I think climate change presents a grand challenge, especially when we think about it combined with aging systems, as well as an increasing reliance on septic. One out of every three new homes is now constructed with a septic system, and that wasn't true just two decades ago. With these factors combined, I really worry about septic-system failure, especially septic-system failure related to heavy rainfall events. We also have coastal communities that are already dealing with the effects of sea level rise and rising water tables overwhelming their systems so that septic systems are no longer providing adequate treatment. This has really dire consequences for public health, but also water quality in rivers, lakes, and oceans. We also have to think about economic implications. It's really hard to maintain and attract businesses to areas without adequate water and wastewater services.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah, that's super interesting. It's funny you mentioned this confluence of issues. We actually have a couple researchers at Resources for the Future—Margaret Walls, who's a cohost of the podcast with me, and Penny Liao—who are actually working on this issue of the compounding effects of climate change and septic-system failures, particularly in coastal Maryland, where sea level rise is a real concern, because elevation is so low to begin with. That'll be a really interesting project to watch.

Maura Allaire: Yes, I follow their work, and it's terrific to see economists work in the wastewater space.

Daniel Raimi: Yeah. Maura, this has been a fascinating conversation. I've learned a ton, and I'm sure our audience has, as well, on this topic that we really haven't spent a ton of time talking about on the show. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your expertise.

I'd love to ask you now the same question that we ask all of our guests at the end of each episode, which is to recommend something that you've read, watched, or heard that you think is great and our audience might enjoy. So, Maura, what's at the top of your literal or your metaphorical reading stack?

Maura Allaire: My literal stack … The first book isn't strictly focused on environmental issues: Heather McGhee's The Sum of Us. I read it on a plane last week, and McGhee takes a nationwide look at federal economic policy and cases of racial injustice. She highlights that many policies might be motivated by a false assumption that economic progress is a zero-sum game, and transferring this to environmental justice issues is interesting. If we could change the hyperlocal paradigm in the water sector, ideally, we could be thinking about improved services as a rising tide that lifts all communities.

Another book is Waste by Catherine Coleman Flowers. It's a phenomenal introduction to sanitation gaps in the South and how communities are affected. She gives a first-hand account of her childhood and advocacy work around wastewater inequities in the Black Belt region of Alabama. Wastewater does not have many champions. Her efforts have built momentum around wastewater access and recognizing it as an issue in the United States.

Daniel Raimi: Those both sound really fascinating and like they would probably go well together as two books you might read back to back. We'll have links to both of those in the show notes, so people can get access to them quickly.

Just want to say, once again, thank you so much, Maura Allaire from Arizona State University, for coming on Resources Radio and telling us all about issues of wastewater and equity. We really appreciate it.

Maura Allaire: Thanks so much for having me.

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