November 28, 2023 - Bruce Berman, Chair, Public Interest Advisory Committee

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency · from the EPA · 4 pages · 224 KB
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Bruce Berman 
2003 Commonwealth Avenue #26 
Brighton, Massachusetts 02135 
1-617-293-6243
bruce@bostonharbor.com 
Michele Barden 
US Environmental Protection Agency - Region 1 
5 Post Office Square, Suite 100 (06-4) 
Boston, MA 02109-3912 
Submitted via email: barden.michele@epa.gov 
Claire Golden 
Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection, Surface Water Discharge Program 150
Presidential Way, Woburn, MA 01801 
Submitted via email: MassDEP.npdes@mass.gov 
Michele and Claire, 
I am writing to you today as the Chair of the Public Interest Advisory Committee (PIAC) of the
Outfall Monitoring Science Advisory Panel (OMSAP) with my concerns and comments on the
proposed revisions to the Deer Island NPDES permit MA0103284. 
Though the 68 page permit and the accompanying 195 page fact sheet made great summer
reading, they are complicated technical documents, which require subject matter expertise to
evaluate. 
To help me, PIAC, and the public to better understand the proposed changes, I looked to the
Massachusetts Water Resources Authority (MWRA) and the Wastewater Advisory Committee
(WAC). I share their concerns that the requirements in the draft concerning Ambient Monitoring,
Harmful Algae Blooms, CSO sampling frequency, and storm event plans, which are unrealistic,
overly proscriptive and inflexible, and place an undue burden on the 43 MWRA cities and towns. 
I also urge you to carefully consider the comments from the Outfall Monitoring Science

Advisory Panel and ask you to include a Science Advisory Panel and a robust monitoring plan
with specific questions in the permit. 
It is particularly hard for me to imagine that you can pull together an effective monitoring plan in
30 days. It took more than one year, a well-attended scientific conference, and countless hours of
peer reviewed research by OMSAP members and others to prepare the white papers on emerging
contaminants and microplastics that inform the current monitoring efforts. The data set produced
by the monitoring program shaped by OMSAP is invaluable to our understanding of the dramatic
changes we have seen in the Southern Gulf of Maine in the past 30 years and likely will face in
the coming years as well. Though the initial questions we framed together have been largely
asked and answered, new questions have emerged which the monitoring needs to address.
I was pleased to see that in this draft you have revised the well intentioned, but unreasonable,
arbitrary and capricious and costly decision to require the MWRA’s cities and towns to pull
together individual storm event plans based on speculations about what the situation will be 100
years from now in just 12 months. Under the initial language in the prior draft permit,
Community A and B might produce individual plans using very different assumptions and
methodologies, while adjacent Community C would not be required to produce a plan at all.
Planning for climate change is critically important, but to be useful it has to be comprehensive
and not piecemeal.
This permit clearly took a very long time to produce, as we have been waiting for the US EPA’s
promised draft permit for more than a decade. From my perspective, it seems unrealistic to
expect the USEPA to thoughtfully revise the permit every five years, which they have been
unable to do in the past.
At the same time, given the rapid changes to the Gulf of Maine due to global warming and
storming, which have resulted in dramatic changes in the species, extent and duration of algae
blooms, and the range of black sea bass, lobsters and invasive species like green crabs and the
Asian shore crab, five years is an awfully long time.
Under the circumstances, I’d urge you to build more flexibility into the permit, and to continue to
provide opportunities for both independent scientists with subject matter expertise and the public
to have near real time input into thresholds, exceedances and the monitoring regime.
For more than 20 years, OMSAP and PIAC have played a critical role in helping the regulators
and the public understand and respond to the impacts of the Mass Bay Outfall on the changing
marine environment. For reasons that I still do not fully understand - in part because those who
made the decision within the US EPA are not permitted to freely discuss their thinking – the US
EPA has chosen to remove both OMSAP and PIAC from the permit, which I believe is a big
mistake. 
The men and women who volunteer to serve on OMSAP bring subject matter expertise and
institutional resources that have clarified our thinking and increased our understanding of the
impacts of the 250 million gallons of effluent we currently discharge into Mass Bay.

Their work has made it possible for us to keep the commitment Judge A. David Mazzone and
Save the Harbor/Save the Bay’s Founding Chair Beth Nicholson made when the Mass Bay
Outfall went online in September of 2000: The Boston Harbor Cleanup would not come at the
expense of Mass Bay or Cape Cod. 
By my calculation, OMSAP members have contributed more (much more) than $4 million
dollars in in-kind contributions to make certain that the Boston Harbor cleanup did not come at
the expense of the health of Mass Bay. The idea that the expert advice and institutional resources
this panel provides can be replaced by a handful of well-intentioned government regulators with
very full plates seems silly. 
PIAC also performs two functions that are critical to the continued success of the Boston Harbor
Cleanup. We share the public’s questions and concerns about the impacts and potential impacts
of the outfall on the public’s health and the health of the Boston Harbor, Broad Sound, Mass Bay
and the Gulf of Maine with OMSAP, and share OMSAP’s answers and insights with the public
and the press. 
Over the past twenty years I have often reached out to the group and individual members of
OMSAP with questions from the public and the press about algae blooms, fish kills, unexplained
marine mammal mortality, dissolved oxygen concentration and saturation, and emerging
contaminants. Sometimes they seemed silly. Sometimes not. 
In every case, no matter what the question, I have received a prompt, forthright, and collegial
response. They have attended numerous meetings on their own time and at their own expense to
explain complicated facts to sometimes skeptical advocates, activists and the public. 
Over the same period, I have often reached out to the men and women of EPA Region 1 with
similar questions, many of whom I consider my friends and allies. Though they have often been
frank and forthcoming, too many times I have been told that they cannot freely discuss the matter
with me on the record because of legal, political or policy concerns. 
In 2017, for example, Trump Administration officials e-mailed staff to inform them that they
could no longer discuss agency research or departmental restrictions with anyone outside of the
agency—including news media. That same administration subsequently attempted in 2020 to
limit which scientific data and studies the EPA could even consider in its decision making. 
Good decisions require good data, sound science, subject matter expertise and peer review. Good
public policy requires transparency and the free exchange of ideas. 
For more than 20 years, OMSAP and PIAC have provided decision makers and the public with
good data, subject matter expertise, peer review, transparency and the free exchange of ideas and
information critical to informed decision making.
The direct cost of both OMSAP and PIAC to the Commonwealth is minimal – postage, a part
time staffer, and occasionally lunch at a meeting. I strongly urge you to find a way to keep both
OMSAP and PIAC in the permit. If it helps, I’ll buy lunch for as long as I am Chair.

Thanks for your time and attention. 
All the best, 
E. Bruce Berman, Jr., Chair,
Public Interest Advisory Committee, Outfall Monitoring Science Advisory Panel