Corpus Christi Wastewater Consent Decree Negotiation

and Implementation: Lessons Learned

by Miles K. Risley, City Attorney, City of Corpus Christi
and
Aimee Alcorn-Reed, Assistant City Attorney

Alexandra Harmon, Engineer III

Amanda Risley, Engineer II, EIT
Amy Tuley, Engineering Associate, EIT
City of Corpus Christi Utilities Department
 City of Corpus Christi Consent Decree
• The City of Corpus Christi entered into a consent
decree with the EPA and the TCEQ in January of
2021.
• The City and the EPA spent approximately a decade
negotiating our consent decree.
• The final decree will require more than $800,000,000
of improvements over 15 years.
• City of Corpus Christi consent decree can be viewed
at
https://corpuschristi.legistar.com/LegislationDetail.asp
x?ID=4606709&GUID=BC320F0D-DD35-4DC0-B27D-
B012962824F2&Options=&Search=
 EPA Enforcement Action
• When EPA began ramping up its enforcement efforts
more than 10 years ago, the City of Corpus Christi
reported more than 1400 spills and overflows every year
and the EPA threatened millions of dollars in fines and
billions improvements to the City’s sanitary sewer
collection and treatment system, with a completion time
of only 10 years.
• Initial EPA demands would have increased sewer rates
by more than 100% to comply with the EPA’s demand
for City compliance with EPA mandates that involved
Closed Circuit Television and cleaning of all of the City’s
sewers and replacement of vast, functioning sections of
City sewers over a relatively short capital project
timeline of only 10 years.
 Importance of Negotiation
• In response to the EPA effort, the City of Corpus
Christi began a program of intensive, reducing the
number of reported spills and overflows by more than
90% during the period of negotiation
• The City countered general EPA demands for general,
expenditures on all infrastructure with an effort
targeted at the most problematic infrastructure, to be
completed over 15 years, instead of 10 years. Instead
of a doubling of sewer rates over 10 years, the City
proposal is now estimated to increase sewer rates by
3% to 5% annually.
• During negotiations, federal officials repeatedly
threatened to sue the City, which could have resulted
in more than $400 million of fines against the City (tied
to EPA penalties for SSOs and effluent excursions).
During negotiations, federal negotiators agreed to an
agreed fine of $1,136,000.
• The final decree also obligates the City to pay
stipulated daily penalties for overflows (up to $1,000
per day for overflows and $3,000 per day for overflows
reaching waters of the U.S.), failure to submit decree
deliverables (up to $4,000 per day), some specified
effluent limit violations (up to $3,000 per day).
• Penalties in the final decree are about half of what the
EPA originally sought.
• The initially demanded decree contained a long list of
capital improvements the EPA had gleaned from prior
plans proposed by the City, many of which were
preliminary at the time of initial planning. The final
decree only required two major capital improvements.
• The decree also required the City to measure capacity
constraints and add capacity to the constrained parts
of the City’s sewer system within 15 years after entry
of the decree. The City has developed a hydraulic
model and discovered numerous potential capacity
constraints in its wastewater collection system.
• During negotiations, Corpus Christi and the EPA reached
agreement on the details of several plans, including a
Capacity, Management, Operation and Maintenance Plan
(CMOM Plan), a Sanitary Sewer Overflow Response Plan
(SSO Response Plan), and a Fats, Oil & Grease Plan
(FOG Plan). The City is now operating largely in
accordance with these plans.
• Other requirements:
• Complete the inspection of City’s force mains and force main air relief
valves within 2 years and inspect manholes within 4 years of the
effective date of the decree
• CCTV all of City’s clay pipe installed before 1974 and all
neighborhoods with a sanitary sewer overflow since 2012
• Assess the remainder of the City’s sewer system. Based on this
assessment, the City will repair the most damaged parts of its
sanitary sewer system within 6.5 years for the prioritized projects and
15 years for the remainder and implement an intensive schedule of
repeat maintenance of its sanitary sewer system.
 Implementation
• As shown, the City started the required work before
the Consent Decree was finalized.
• As of one year after the Consent Decree was
approved, the City had completed the following work:
• Clean 169 miles of gravity mains and inspect 190 miles, which
puts us ahead on those milestones.
• Inspect 2,513 manholes, 138 force mains, 241 ARVs, 71 lift
stations, all ahead of schedule.
• Compliance Programs and Processes
• Conducting Education and Outreach, specifically for FOG, and
smoke testing
• Created internal work group that tracks progress and focuses on
meeting required deadlines.
 Scheduled Implementation
• $80M in Wastewater Capital Improvement
Projects in 2022, with $380M planned in next 5
years.
• City is currently on track to complete the
following:
• Inspect all ARVs and force mains by January 2023
• Inspect all lift stations, clean and inspect all small-
diameter gravity mains in priority neighborhoods,
inspect all manholes for large-diameter gravity mains
by January 2025
• Complete all small-diameter gravity main priority
projects by January 2027.
 Lessons Learned
1. Aggregate the Overflows in reporting BEFORE the EPA
targets your City for enforcement action.
• A rainstorm causing multiple overflows on a single pipe are a
single overflow. Not realizing that lesson early caused us to
multiply our number of overflows into scary numbers
(thousands) and get unwanted EPA attention.

2. Deal with enforcement actions early.

3. Clean the sewers.

• While sewers are not supposed to be pristine, cleaning is far less
expensive than the reconstruction and repairs the EPA will force
upon a City that fails to clean its sewers.
4. Negotiate EVERY term.
• Take nothing for granted from the EPA and don’t expect the EPA to
be reasonable. Bureaucrats are often incentivized to be
unreasonable.
• Don’t wait until there are surprises during implementation.
Always have your bases covered.
5. Make the EPA enforce its own rules.
• The EPA is understaffed. Therefore, it will rationally try to
pawn off its enforcement duties onto third parties. This is not
to your benefit.
• All enforcement agencies (federal, state, and local) have
unlimited violations and limited staff.
6. Do not let the EPA expand its jurisdiction beyond its initial
claim.
• They attempted to do so with us. If they are arguing about
wastewater, they will attempt to incorporate stormwater into
their order. In a non-combined sewer system, they are then
combining different regulatory schemes.
7. Use elected officials sparingly.
• Your goal is to avoid the lawsuit. You will need a compelling story
for the media and brief your elected officials fully on the
impending suit.

8. Do not rely too much on affordability arguments.

• The EPA’s technical personnel who are making management
decisions in negotiation are more sympathetic to scientific or
engineering arguments than social justice arguments. Any
affordability argument, to have any effect, would need substantial
data to back it up. We made many affordability arguments through
the years without much indication from EPA that they were having
significant effect.

9. Pay as close attention to the documents that are incorporated

into the consent decree as the wording of the consent
decree.
• Much EPA overreach occurs through attachments. Initial iterations
of our consent decree incorporated many, many documents that
10. Your City will need an expert on engineering who
has previously negotiated with the EPA.

11. Minimize the area owned by the City.

• The EPA cares about your sewers. They are unable to address
the overflows from private laterals.
• If you terminate private ownership at the right-of-way line, you
are enhancing your reportable overflows at the expense of
future EPA scrutiny.

12. Address fats, oils, and grease with a good FOG

ordinance.
• FOG is low hanging fruit for a City.
• Please note, the biggest FOG violators will generally be the
restaurants most heavily frequented by your mayor and City
Council.
13. Obtain approval of the incorporated documents before agreeing
to the Consent Decree.
• The EPA will attempt to lock you into a decree that requires you
to submit various plans for approval after approval of the
Consent Decree.
• After approval of the Consent Decree, your City will have no
negotiating leverage. Accordingly, we insisted on pre-approval
of our Fats Oils and Grease (FOG) Plan, Capacity,
Management, Operation, and Maintenance (CMOM) Plan, and
Sanitary Sewer Overflow (SSO) Response Plan
14. Be pessimistic on expected completion dates when specifying
capital improvements in decree
• During negotiations, the EPA will repeatedly assure you of
future flexibility. They are a federal regulatory agency. After
completion of our decree, we attempted to negotiate a faster
completion timeline to some of our obligations. EPA said “no”.
• Some contractors will fail. A failed project should be assumed to
add 3 to 4 years to your projected completion time.
15. Review the latest negotiated consent decrees prior to
negotiating a particular term.
• EPA consent decrees can be viewed at  
https://cfpub.epa.gov/enforcement/cases/

16. Initiate all of the programs required by the EPA in the consent
decree prior to agreeing to any of the programs.
• Accurate rates of needed repairs that a CCTV program will yield
can only be provided after you start operating the program.
• Internal and external engineers & Internal and external CCTV
contractors will provide significantly different quality and yield
rates depending on how they are trained and incentivized
• Corpus Christi started using contractors in 2014 to systematically
perform Pipeline Assessment Certification Program (PACP)
inspections on the worst lines in the system. 
• Corpus Christi performed 151 miles of small diameter CCTV
prior to the Consent Decree effective date
Map of Map of CCTV performed prior to
CCTV done Consent Decree Effective Date
prior to the
effective date
in key areas
17. Expect Scope Expansion when working in old areas. 

Ex. Mary/Staples Emergency-

Manhole collapsed during
pipebursting trapping the
pipebursting foot and head in
the manhole. Could not
excavate to remove
the pipebursting head because it
would fall onto an old water line
that was installed against plan
directions. 
15. Create flow charts for consent decree activities.
• When making flow charts, include a representative from each group
mentioned in the process in review sessions. 
• Flow charts greatly increase the likelihood that technical disciplines in
different areas will follow consent decree
18. Incorporate consent decree protocols into asset management
activities.
• Use Asset Management software (eg IBM Maximo) to track
assets and work orders. Use a QA/QC program to ensure
work orders are made consistently for accurate reporting. 
• Connect Asset Management Software to Data Visualization
Software (such as MS PowerBI) to clearly communicate key
analytics to employees. 

19. Involve consent decree team in inspections so they can make

sure the data being collected is of high enough quality to be
actionable. 
• The requirements of Consent Decree inspections may differ slightly
from what City Crews were previously trained to look for. Have a
member from the Consent Decree team accompany inspection
crews on key inspections (eg large lift stations) to provide guidance
on what information they need. 
20. Look into projects planned to satisfy other objectives to check
if they also satisfy the criteria for a consent decree priority project
• Coordinate with the streets department to replace pipes under
roads being repaved. Often streets focus their restoration on older
neighborhoods with problem wastewater pipes.
• Collect data on typical operations so that these actions can be
reported to the EPA for credit on decree
• Assets found in the field
• Cleaning Data
• CCTV done for any operation
21. Utilize CMOM (Capacity, Management Operation and
Maintenance) Plan to help prioritize and organize the conditions
required of the consent decree
• Ensures that routine inspections of lift stations, valves, manhole
and pipe condition are being performed
• Regular inspections allow for maintenance issues be to addressed
routinely before
• causing an SSO
• causing an expensive replacement instead of a repair
• A quality CMOM allow the City to focus on prevention instead of
reaction

22. Devote some positions entirely to Consent Decree

• Consent Decree will take the backseat to normal operations if it does not
have a dedicated team.
• Ex. Consent Decree Work Coordinator, Compliance Program Manager,
Consent Decree GIS specialist, Consent Decree Engineers, CCTV crews,
CCTV work coordinator, Consent Decree crews for ARV, force mains, lift
stations.
23. Regularly review work to determine whether internal crews
or contracted crews provide most consistent quality control
• Benefits to using in-house CCTV
• Lower costs for a long-term program
• Can offer a quick response to investigate potential problems
• CCTV is immediately available for review because the scans
are stored in house. 
• Benefits to Contractor-driven CCTV
• Contractors can offer more incentives to their employees to
accomplish quality CCTV at a faster pace. 
• Training – Performance of CCTV PACP inspections is a skill
and contractors have already trained their
personnel to collect quality CCTV. 
• Specialty – Contractors are specialized so the inspections
they perform and databases they provide are consistent. 
• Equipment – Contractors already have all the required
equipment and software to collect CCTV and are already
trained to effectively use it all. 
24. Hire a team of attorneys and engineers who have
previously negotiated Clean Water Act Consent Decree(s) with
the EPA