After decades struggling with failing sewage infrastructure, the majority-Black city of Mount Vernon, New York, is getting a significant funding package aimed at preventing unsanitary backups in homes and stopping pollution from leaking into local rivers.
New York’s governor, Kathy Hochul, announced on Friday that the state will dedicate $150m toward projects that include repairing and replacing the city’s collapsing sewage pipes. Some of the funding is set aside for families affected by the sewage failures. It would also help bring the city into compliance with federal court orders to stop raw sewage from pouring into the Bronx and Hutchinson rivers, which flow south into New York City’s Bronx borough, as the Guardian reported last year.
“In too many communities of color like Mount Vernon, critical water infrastructure has been left to fall into disrepair, but today we are setting an example for the nation by advancing environmental justice, improving quality of life for residents, and addressing decades of disinvestment,” Hochul said in a statement.
Mount Vernon, which is in Westchester county and just a 30-minute train ride from Grand Central Station in Manhattan, is one of America’s most extreme examples of what happens when infrastructure problems fester. The city sits atop a century-old network of wastewater pipes meant for a population much smaller than today’s 74,000 residents. Mayor Shawyn Patterson-Howard previously told the Guardian that the city has lacked the funding to revamp its infrastructure and has treated its sewage pipes like a “hot potato passed from administration to administration”.
This city has far more Black residents – and far lower household incomes – than the rest of Westchester county. The Biden administration has pointed to such communities as places that would benefit from huge investments in infrastructure.
Maintenance problems in Mount Vernon began to spiral out of control in recent years. By 2020, when Patterson-Howard took office, at least 1,000 families were at risk of sewage backups in their houses, and pipes were collapsing all over town – faster than the city’s sewer crew could keep up. The federal government and the state had also sued the city, ordering it to figure out how to stop sewage from polluting local waterways. Officials in town estimated that overhauling the sewers might require between $100m and $200m – a sum they said the city could not meet on its own.
Mount Vernon’s public works commissioner, Damani Bush, previously said reporting by the Guardian had “set fire” to the case, helping unite stakeholders interested in solving the sanitation problems.
Patterson-Howard worked with environmental authorities and lawmakers to secure the new funding for her city’s wastewater network. “Rebuilding our infrastructure is critical to the economic, social and physical health of the community,” she said in a statement.
The initiative also sets aside $7m to fix one of the city’s most visible emergencies, located along the densely populated Third Street corridor. With pipes buried too deep to reach with run-of-the-mill municipal equipment, this pain-point in the city’s network no longer allows sewage to flow. The city placed a bypass pump the size of a small car in the middle of the busy street, to force human waste through the pipes. The fix was meant to be temporary. More than a year later, it’s still pumping.
A pilot program will launch as part of a new initiative that will let some households get resiliency upgrades to their pipes. Several residents in Mount Vernon told the Guardian that their basements or garages flood with foul-smelling sludge during rainy weather.
The city has previously received smaller funding packages to address its sanitation problems, including a $10m grant earlier this year to target river pollution.
