City agreed to pay $4,400,000 civil penalty and implement approximately $2 billion in sewer system improvements over 15 years, including comprehensive rehabilitation of 6,100+ miles of sewer infrastructure and installation of system-wide monitoring sensors.

City of Houston, Texas — Sanitary Sewer Overflow Consent Decree (2019)

Outcome: City agreed to pay $4,400,000 civil penalty and implement approximately $2 billion in sewer infrastructure improvements over 15 years, including comprehensive assessment and repair of over 6,100 miles of sewer pipe and installation of system-wide flow monitoring, to resolve chronic sanitary sewer overflows and effluent limit exceedances.

The City of Houston, Texas — the fourth-largest city in the United States with a population exceeding 2.3 million — operated the country's third-largest municipal wastewater system, comprising 39 wastewater treatment plants and more than 6,100 miles of sewer pipe. Over many years, the system generated documented violations including effluent limit exceedances at treatment facilities, frequent raw sewage discharges to Bayou Greenway waterways and other local waterways through sanitary sewer overflows, and failure to properly maintain the collection system. These discharges affected Buffalo Bayou, Brays Bayou, White Oak Bayou, and other waterways that drain through the city's urban core.

The settlement, announced August 27, 2019, required the city to pay a $4,400,000 civil penalty split equally between the United States and the State of Texas, and to implement a 15-year comprehensive corrective action program estimated to cost approximately $2 billion. Required measures include systematic assessment and repair or replacement of sewer infrastructure, installation of flow monitoring sensors throughout the collection system to detect and locate infiltration and overflow events, capacity improvements at pump stations and treatment plants, and implementation of city-wide capacity, management, operations, and maintenance (CMOM) programs.

The settlement was co-enforced by EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Houston's consent decree represents one of the most complex and expensive sewer compliance programs ever negotiated with a single municipality, reflecting both the scale of the city's infrastructure and the accumulated deferred maintenance resulting from decades of rapid growth outpacing infrastructure investment.

Primary Source: City of Houston Clean Water Act Settlement Information Sheet | US EPA