The Advertiser's editorial of April 8, "City must plan for sewage treatment upgrades," offered an insightful and reasoned justification for a planning process that is sure to be lengthy and costly.

As the editorial correctly noted, the Enviromental Protection Agency's tentative decision, if extended to our Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, could ultimately cost O'ahu residents upwards of $1 billion in construction costs alone. Many additional sewer rate increases will definitely be required if the EPA has its way.

My administration and all of the hard-working city employees on wastewater projects and infrastructure have absolutely taken on the responsibility and challenge of addressing what the EPA has called "decades of neglect." As the editorial noted, we have already raised sewer fees once, and the magnitude of our challenges has meant we have had to propose raising them once again this coming summer. We have committed nearly $1 billion for sewer projects for the past two fiscal years and the upcoming one, and earmarked $300 million solely for our force mains. And we installed a temporary bypass for the Beachwalk force main in record time.

In the coming months and years, in keeping with my pledge for transparency in government, we will keep the public updated about our ongoing discussions with EPA. From the editorial, though, it appears that additional information may be helpful to the public in understanding these issues.

First, the editorial recom-mended that the city explore additional funding sources, such as State Revolving Fund monies and federal grants. Please rest assured that if such monies are available and advantageous to the city, we will exhaust all such opportunities, including re-enlisting the assistance of our congressional delegation. Currently, the State Revolving Fund, which is a loan program, is very limited, and we do not know of any outright grants from the federal government for wastewater infrastructure work.

Second, John Kemmerer of the EPA in San Francisco states: "There's ample evidence that Honolulu needs ultimately to bring all its sewage treatment up to standard." This really is not an accurate statement, and for the public's sake, we all need to keep clear in our minds the difference between treatment and collection of sewage. We have repeatedly said that we need to prioritize work on our collection system, so that spills (including the 2006 Beachwalk spill) are minimized. Spills, after all, generally result in untreated wastewater being released into, among other places, the recreational shoreline waters.

Discharges of treated wastewater from treatment plants into deep marine environments, though, are a different story. This is where we are saying there is no imminent crisis. The outfall at Honouliuli is approximately 1.5 miles out and is more than 200 feet deep. The 301(h) waiver program of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act was established to allow publicly owned treatment plants in coastal communities, like us, to discharge less-than-secondary treated effluent into the deep ocean waters. There has been no negative impact to the marine environment at our outfalls. The president of the 400-member Hawaii Water Environment Association opined recently, "There is no scientific evidence that shows such an upgrade (to secondary treatment at Honouliuli) will improve water quality conditions ...." And perhaps most telling of all, the EPA waited 12 years to issue the tentative denial of the Honouliuli waiver.

For the past year, we have been trying to negotiate a "global" settlement with the EPA, one that includes a systemwide, cost-effective, affordable approach to resolving all of our sewage collection and treatment issues, with priority on our collection system. The EPA instead wants to address the collection system and the treatment plants in "stovepipes," as if the city had unlimited resources with which to address both within the next decade or two. This is unfair to the ratepayer, and the benefit of secondary treatment to the outfall's marine environment is speculative at best.

We realize the EPA has been under tremendous pressure from the environmental groups and their Mainland attorneys threatening to sue the EPA. The EPA needs to listen to what other folks are saying, as well: the residents of O'ahu, senior Sen. Daniel Inouye, other members of our congressional delegation, several City Council members, state legislators, and engineers and scientists who are experts on these issues.

The overwhelming sentiment is that the EPA should afford this administration exactly what The Advertiser's editorial recommends: the opportunity for us to plan our sewer work in a cost-effective manner that protects the environment and public health and safety.

Honolulu Mayor Mufi Hannemann wrote this commentary for The Advertiser.