Back in September, Baltimore officials referenced “detailed modeling” when announcing the city could not meet its 2030 deadline under a federal consent decree to stop raw sewage from overflowing during rain events into city waterways and basements.

Last night, public works officials added a new angle, arguing that pushing project completion back another 16 years – to 2046 –  is necessary to keep customer water rates “affordable.”

“It doesn’t do any good to do all this work and people can’t afford the benefits of it,” said Paul Sayan, deputy bureau head of water and wastewater, at the annual legally mandated public meeting held by the Department of Public Works (DPW).

“Even if we were able to complete all of this work that we had proposed in our Phase II plan by 2030 – if logistically it was even possible and we had all the money to do it – the rates would be just too high for many people to afford, wastewater rates, and that’s not something a responsible utility would do,” Sayan told the audience assembled at the Cylburn Arboretum Vollmer Center.

In 2025, the wastewater portion of a city customer’s bill underwent its biggest increase in recent history – 18.06% -amounting to about $160 a month in total utility charges for an average customer.

While soaring bills have triggered intense criticism of the Brandon Scott administration, so has the city’s failure to stop health-harming pollution it originally promised to end by 2016.

Pushing back against the embarrassment of a second missed consent decree deadline, DPW Director Matthew Garbark said this last night:

“There is something I’d like to address and to clarify. We are in no way asking for an extension on the existing commitments, and we remain committed to those projects as they are planned.”

His statement contradicted what DPW said last September after it issued its “Revised Phase II Plan (Revision 3)” of a consent decree originally entered into with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) in 2002.

“This means the city will not meet the original 2030 deadline set for finishing the consent decree work,” a DPW press release then stated.

“Adaptive management approach”

It fell to Sayan to explain how Garbark could make this argument.

He began by noting the city’s collaboration since 2023 with Baltimore County, which sends wastewater through DPW pipes in the city to be treated at the Back River and Patapsco treatment plants.

“We received their updated flow monitoring, rainfall data, their updated hydraulic model” and, combining portions of it with the city’s model, DPW looked at “results based off of the county flows and how that’s affecting the city.”

“However,” he continued, “when we were doing the analysis with Baltimore County and updating our own model from updated rainfall and flow monitoring data, we identified additional improvements that are needed in order to meet full compliance of the modified consent decree.

“And it is that additional work that requires us to extend beyond the 2030 date to 2046,” he concluded.

The delayed deadline “strikes a balance” between ending sewage overflows and meeting the financial constraints of the city and its customers, DPW says.

Noting that its modeling involves predicting future sewage overflow volumes, Sayan said the city needs extra time to look more closely at the numbers to minimize costs that would be passed on to customers.

“We’re predicted to be at 94% reduction in 2030. In order to get that extra 6% decrease, it comes at a cost of $674 million,” he said, which is why “we’re proposing this extra time in order to confirm: Do we actually need to spend $674 million to get to 100% compliance?”

Rather than calling it a blown deadline or “moving the goalposts,” as Blue Water Baltimore labeled it, DPW officials used another name last night: an “adaptive management approach.”

According to Sayan, such an approach “strikes a balance between completing the plan, meeting the modified consent decree requirements and the financial constraints of both the city utility and our customers.”

Proprietary Data

Regardless of how it’s framed, the city’s proposed 16-year delay has sparked criticism from groups representing customers and the environment, who noted that the city’s low-income and Black residents bear the brunt of sewage overflows and residential backups.

“DPW needs to understand and prioritize the most-impacted neighborhoods in their work to stop sewage overflows,” Blue Water Baltimore Harborkeeper Alice Volpitta said in a letter to Garbark, joined by Jennifer Kunze of Clean Water Action Maryland.

Representatives of both groups were present last night, asking at one point for DPW to “clarify when and how you’ll make your hydraulic model, climate data and any other modeling data public.”

Sayan told them it can’t be done for proprietary reasons.

“It actually requires some proprietary software,” he said. “It would require the software in order to run that, or even see the model and the model results.”

An audience member asked if there was any way DPW could share the assumptions it is basing future predictions on with the public.

“We know that SSOs are being under reported,” the questioner said. “We just want to make sure that we can peer-review the data, including the climate data. We know that is changing, and there’s not necessarily a common understanding of what climate data should be at the federal level right now.”

Sayan acknowledged that “DPW can do a better job at communicating to the public, to our stakeholders. We haven’t done it as well as we should.”

On the matter of possible data sharing, he deferred to Garbark, who said, “We are committed to working with whoever wants to see this data to get the information, so long as it’s not proprietary or protected.”