After Years of Suffering By Low-Income and BIPOC Communities, Court Orders Houston to Obey Clean Water Act and Invest $2BN on Major Upgrades to Sewer System
Kristen Schlemmer, Legal Director, Bayou City Waterkeeper
This spring, a federal judge in Texas approved a legal settlement requiring the City of Houston to spend $2 billion on major upgrades to its sanitary sewer system over the next 15 years. The federal court’s order puts the cap on years of litigation over thousands of Clean Water Act violations caused by the City of Houston’s sanitary sewer system.
In 2018, Bayou City Waterkeeper uncovered these violations after combing through five years of data submitted by the City of Houston to the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality. We identified thousands of illegal overflows that had occurred across the City’s massive sanitary sewer system and had polluted our local bayous and creeks, as well as neighborhood parks and school playgrounds. This led us to serve the City of Houston with a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Water Act, which prompted the United States and the State of Texas to file an enforcement action two months later.
Houston's outdated sewer system has sent millions of gallons of untreated sewage into the city's waterways like Buffalo Bayou.
Throughout the litigation, in which we were represented by Lauren Ice of Perales, Allmon, & Ice, PC, and our Legal Director Kristen Schlemmer, we pressed the governmental parties to address well-known environmental injustices in the City’s sanitary sewer system. In 2016, the Houston Chronicle reported lower-income communities and communities of color are “most likely to feel the consequences of Houston’s long-running struggle with sewer overflows.” Our 2020 mapping and analysis confirmed this conclusion.
To address this gap, we urged the creation of a supplemental environmental project to help low-income residents affected by sewer problems that had been promised by the City in 2018, and other measures to help low-income residents pay for sewer repairs at their homes and businesses. In rejecting this option, the City of Houston focused on the fiscal bottom line and refused requests to directly confront environmental injustices or be transparent about financial impacts to local residents.
In granting the United States and State of Texas’ motion to enter the settlement (called a consent decree), the judge formalized the City’s obligation to invest $2 billion in local sanitary sewer infrastructure, but did not require any comprehensive plan to address environmental injustices or problems with private sewer laterals.
We strongly believe the settlement represents an important first step to giving Houston residents a real solution to the sewage problems we see and smell after every major rain. But it may fall short in one key respect: by not sufficiently accounting for low-income Houstonians who regularly deal with sewage backing up into their homes and pooling in the yards where their children play. Over the 15-year life of the consent decree, Bayou City Waterkeeper will continue to push the City to close this gap and will closely monitor the City’s compliance with the Clean Water Act.
For 20 years, Bayou City Waterkeeper has worked across the greater Houston area to protect the bayous, creeks, bays, and wetlands within the Lower Galveston Bay Watershed and the people who depend on them. Using law and science, we work at the intersection of conservation and environmental justice and collaborate with local communities to push back against pollution and irresponsible development, fill gaps in regulatory enforcement, and build community power.