There has been a great deal of confusion about what the MINIMUM likely costs of the centralized sewer that Town Manager Hinchey has chosen for Chatham will be.

Most of the confusion was created by Mr. Hinchey's presentation of 47 PowerPoint slides at a selectmen's meeting on February 23rd and compounded by a "sewer cost calculator" put on the town website using the same misleading data. A great deal of irrelevant information was included in the slideshow which added to the confusion.

What taxpayers want to know is what costs we are being committed to. Mr. Hinchey did not answer that key question.

What numbers Mr. Hinchey' said the centralized sewer would cost are substantially less than what Chatham Concerned Taxpayers estimate the MINIMUM estimated taxpayer costs will be. The difference is almost $200 million. CCT has prepared a simple chart to show what costs Mr. Hinchey left out or got wrong. Click on the chart to enlarge it.

What do these staggering costs mean for property owners who are being sewered and those who are not?

Again, CCT has prepared an easy-to-read chart so any property owner can calculate what his MINIMUM costs are likely to be. Click on chart to enlarge.

We say MINIMUM projected costs because long-term projects such as these always run into "unforeseen" costs. Boston's Big Dig's costs grew from about $2 billion to about $20 billion, as our retired accounting expert warned us.

Sewer property taxes will rise steadily over the next 20 years, stay high for ten years and then begin a slow decline for the last 20 years of financing. They will be a burden on town budgets and needed capital projects for five decades.

The tragedy for Chatham taxpayers is that cleaning up Chatham's coastal waters of the excess nitrogen that is blamed for deteriorating water quality can be done for far less cost than the massive overkill of a Big City Sewer.

No less an authority than the federal Environmental Protection Agency says alternatives such as cluster systems can save taxpayers many, many tens of millions of dollars. Says the EPA:

Cluster systems can achieve significant economies of scale to provide high levels of treatment at costs significantly less (25 percent to 50 percent) than centralized sewer systems.

EPA also notes (p.6-7, EPA publication cited above) that cluster systems used with permeable reactive barriers (such as are now being proposed by Lombardo Associates in Falmouth and Mashpee) placed at water's edge to intercept groundwater plumes can reduce costs even more by removing nitrogen from all sources, including fertilizers and animal waste. Cluster systems also lend themselves to an incremental approach, to test out the state-supplied but untested solutions to see if indeed they work before investing hundreds of millions of dollars.

There is one taxpayer cost that is usually not mentioned, but is important. With a centralized sewer system, taxpayers' investments in acceptably functioning septic systems will be destroyed. Chatham homeowners collectively stand to "lose" more than $50 million they have already spent.

In Chatham's case, instead of a half billion project, it could be a $250 million project or less, still expensive but substantially less of a burden on town budgets and taxpayers over the next five decades. Cluster systems with permeable reactive barriers can do the job cheaper, better and faster without tearing up 110 miles of streets and installing 88 large pump stations and thousands of seven-foot high grinder pumps.

These other options are readily available to Chatham, but the Town Manager has been immovable in his opposition to considering them. Sadly for taxpayers, the selectmen have agreed to support the Town Manager's opposition, refusing even to conduct an objective evaluation of such alternatives as Falmouth and Mashpee are now doing.

The people who will pay for such intransigence are Chatham's taxpayers. The environment will suffer as well. Many fear that upping the flow of treated sewage from 100,000 gallons a day to 2 million gallons a day will overwhelm Cockle Cove Creek and result in serious damage to the marsh, Buck's Creek and Sulphur Springs.

Others fear that Chatham will become a hub for wastewater from Harwich, Orleans and Brewster as Dr. Duncanson envisioned at a selectmen's meeting in January.

Chatham is on the wrong track because it appears that Town Manager Hinchey decided years ago he wanted a regular, old-fashioned Big City Sewer in Chatham. Developments in nitrogen removal that are being evaluated and installed elsewhere in Barnstable County and in other coastal communities along the East Coast and the West Coast are being ignored.

Whether we like it or not, Chatham taxpayers seem destined to spend at least half a billion dollars for a centralized sewer that isn't needed to clean Chatham's waters and may well become to be seen as the White Elephant of Cape Cod.

Unfortunately, the White Elephant is now being railroaded into Chatham. The train is not departing.

The least we can do to acknowledge the contribution of Town Manager Hinchey is to call this "The Hinchey Memorial Sewer." We will remember him when he's gone for the costs he left behind....