Somewhere in between there is room for resolving some issues. I began to 
hear a little bit about this with recent comments such as, "yes, we have to meet some of 
the interim problems along the way." But it seems to me that there still is considerable 
emphasis on heavy hardware coming from a lot of people who see the need to solve the 
problem in the public eye by building a plant on site. Whereas, in fact, a lot of the 
improvements we may be seeing from the scientist's point of view are going to come 
from these interim solutions that we are looking at now; solutions that may, in fact, be 
erroneous. But we don't know yet. So I get the idea that you folks haven't really come 
together yet from the information side to the money-spent side. 
L. Bridges: Along that line, one thing that hasn't really been brought out today 
is that when the waiver was being considered, the state licensing agency, DEQE, actually 
supported the granting of a waiver at one point. And I don't want to speak for them, but 
my impression is that one of the reasons they did was that they felt that the technology 
involved in secondary treatment would not cure the problems caused by the huge amount 
of waste in the Boston Harbor. Namely, there were no effective pretreatment programs 
for complex organic compounds. And it is my understanding that that was one of the 
considerations. Rich, you correct me if I'm wrong. That is one of the reasons why they 
were in support of the waiver application. Is that correct? 
R. Delaney: Basically, I think you described the situation pretty accurately. 
For a number of years, we have been in that state of when do we make the decision? 
When's "D" Day? We've been having this ongoing debate about primary or secondary 
treatment and what is the best dollar value for us to make. Meanwhile, frankly, the 
political pressures and the frustrations and the deterioration of the Harbor continues to 
build to a point where a decision had to be made. There is still ongoing debate about 
primary versus secondary, but the decision has been made. And we are going to go 
forward with that. 
That decision is only one step or one part of the overall solution, the overall 
strategy. We need to deal with the other components—pretreatment, combined sewer 
overflows, sludge, and the treatment plant. From a hardware perspective, there are at 
least four parts to that, and we've described it as number four in terms of primary and 
secondary. But now we've made a decision, we've still got to complement it by addressing 
the other three. That's not always easy because a large amount of dollars that are needed 
to go forward. 
K. Castagna: I'd like also to say that, from EPA's point of view, we never saw 
the only solution to the Boston Harbor pollution problem as the building of the new 
wastewater treatment facility. We see it, as Rich said and as the Commonwealth sees it, 
as a multi-faceted pollution problem that needs many remedies before we'll see 
improvements, one of which, for the nearshore areas, for the beaches, has to be the 
combined sewer overflows into the Harbor and sewage sludge in the Mid- to Outer Harbor. 
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