MWRA to also be involved in a broader management perspective for the Harbor and Bay. 
If we consider that the Harbor and the Bay have a number of specific inputs and that we 
are looking at the marine resource as a whole, then any decisions that the MWRA makes, 
either on what level of treatment it will provide or where it will put the treatment plants, 
will impact the other wastewater treatment facilities. 
The MWRA will have an interest in monitoring Boston Harbor to see if any 
improvement in Boston Harbor's water quality can be charted. Any monitoring that the 
Authority undertakes should be closely coordinated with monitoring efforts being 
conducted either by other treatment facilities or other environmental programs. 
In making a suggestion for a broad program, I think there are a lot of examples 
that we can draw from, especially the Chesapeake Bay area and Seattle, Washington, 
where there was an aggressive program for source control of toxic substances. These are 
the types of examples that we have to use, so we can determine if all sewage treatment 
plants are being put to the same level of standards for cleaning up their effluents and so 
that information is exchanged. In this way, we can get a total picture of whether we are 
achieving any improvement in the Harbor and Massachusetts Bay. 
Question and Answer Discussion 
Question: I would suggest that from what I hear that you may be making the 
same set of mistakes all over again in the following sense~you are proposing, from what I 
hear, that there be an announcement next month of a site or perhaps two sites for the 
treatment plant. Yet at the same time you're saying that there is a set of underlying 
issues, such as overflow, infiltration, inflow, direct discharges into the Harbor. It seems 
to me that you are very much in danger of moving towards heavy hardware solutions that 
are simply not going to solve your problems. All you're going to be doing is taking huge 
amounts of water, up to 90 percent of it for some sort of inflow, and putting it through 
treatment plants that you have built to handle huge capacities, and yet you are not going 
to really be solving the Harbor problem. You'll just be meeting EPA requirements of 
certain standards. So aren't you just repeating the same sets of mistakes that you made 
before here? 
C. Breen: I may not have been clear on that point. First of all, the two 
treatment plants that are now existing are not functioning well at all. In fact, despite the 
delay in an ultimate siting decision, EPA has agreed to fund immediate improvements to 
the plants because we know that it's going to take seven to ten years to design and 
construct new treatment facilities. 
Regardless of the other sources of pollution, something has to be done to 
create new treatment facilities for the system. Something that I just touched upon is the 
infiltration and inflow problem that you mentioned. It was a component of the state court 
suit, and as part of the remedy of that suit, the state department of environmental quality 
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