City agreed to pay $1,136,000 civil penalty and implement approximately $600 million in infrastructure improvements over 15 years, including rehabilitation of roughly 450 miles of sewer lines, to resolve effluent exceedances and chronic sanitary sewer overflows.

City of Corpus Christi, Texas — SSO and Effluent Violations (2020)

Outcome: City agreed to pay $1,136,000 civil penalty and implement approximately $600 million in sewer infrastructure improvements over 15 years, including the rehabilitation of roughly 450 miles of sewer lines, to resolve chronic sanitary sewer overflows and effluent limit exceedances.

The City of Corpus Christi, Texas — a coastal city of approximately 320,000 residents and the eighth-largest city in Texas — operated a wastewater collection and treatment system with documented violations including frequent discharges of raw sewage to waters of the United States through sanitary sewer overflows, effluent limit exceedances at treatment plants, and failure to prevent overflow events from a deteriorating collection system. The violations affected Corpus Christi Bay and tributary waterways along the Texas Gulf Coast.

The settlement, announced September 25, 2020, required the city to pay a $1,136,000 civil penalty split equally between the United States and the State of Texas and to implement a comprehensive 15-year capital improvement program estimated at $600 million. Required work includes assessment and rehabilitation or replacement of approximately 450 miles of sewer lines, construction of infrastructure improvements to prevent SSOs, implementation of capacity management and maintenance programs, and installation of system monitoring. The settlement was jointly overseen by EPA and the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ).

Corpus Christi's consent decree reflects the scale of deferred maintenance in the Sun Belt: rapid post-war growth built out sewer infrastructure that is now 50-70 years old, and the combination of aging materials, corrosive coastal conditions, and population growth has overwhelmed collection system capacity. The $600 million compliance cost represents one of the larger single-city sewer consent decree commitments in EPA Region 6 history.

Primary Source: City of Corpus Christi, Texas Clean Water Act Settlement | US EPA