Honolulu’s sewage spills have plummeted in the last two decades thanks to extensive federally mandated upgrades, including fixing hundreds of miles of pipes each year and bolstering pump stations that send sewage to treatment plants.

But the city says more upgrades are needed, which is why it is poised to raise sewer rates for the first time in 10 years.

The work includes further treatment of wastewater that is discharged into the ocean, which can close beaches and pose an environmental and safety hazard for residents and tourists.

City officials are also racing to meet a 2035 deadline to complete a $2.5 billion upgrade to a secondary treatment system at Oʻahu’s biggest sewage plant on Sand Island.

The issue has dominated recent City Council meetings, with discussions focusing on the first sewage fee increases since 2016 and how to make them as painless as possible for Honolulu homeowners already facing one of the nation’s highest costs of living.

The full council is scheduled to vote Wednesday on a bill that as currently written would raise sewage fees each year by 6%, 7.5%, 8.5%, 9%, 9% and then 9%, beginning on Jan. 1 and then increasing each July 1 to coincide with the fiscal year. To incentivize lower water usage, it would charge a higher rate as more water is used, meaning families that use more water would see their fees increase more than families who use less water.

Two other versions of the bill being deliberated that day would charge lower rates, and all would still be less than the 10-year, 115% rate increase originally proposed by Mayor Rick Blangiardi’s administration.

Meanwhile, some council members have thrown a curveball, questioning whether the planned upgrade at the Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, which would further purify the water before it’s discharged into the ocean, is even necessary.

“I still go back to whether or not we should even be doing the secondary containment, knowing that we’re already doing things that comply with what the EPA has asked us to do,” council member Andria Tupola said at a committee meeting in mid-May.

The Secondary Treatment Factor

The upgrade to a secondary treatment system at the Sand Island Wastewater Treatment Plant is the last big task the city needs to finish to comply with a 2010 consent decree agreed to with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and environmental advocacy groups.

In the past, equipment failure within the treatment plants, pump stations and pipes caused dozens of sewage spills, although the number has declined from 200 in 2006 to 31 last year, according to the Department of Environmental Services, which is responsible for Oʻahu’s sewer system.

But in the years since the consent decree took effect, the cause the sewage spill has more often become grease buildup or tree roots.

“Roots find their way to water,” Roger Babcock, director of the Department of Environmental Services, said Thursday.

Last October, 95 gallons of sewage spilled out of a manhole off Kapiʻolani Boulevard. The spill lasted about two hours, and while 60 gallons were recovered, 35 gallons seeped into the ground. Grease buildup was the culprit.

Babcock said the city tries to address this by cleaning about 650 miles of sewer lines each year using a combination of what’s essentially powerwashing to remove grease and a rotating cutting blade plus treatment chemicals to subdue root growth.

This fulfills part of the federal consent decree, which mandates that Honolulu inspect and repair at least 500 of its roughly 2,100 miles of sewer lines each year.

Other requirements included upgrading the pump stations that propel wastewater to treatment plants and adding secondary treatment to the Honouliuli Wastewater Treatment Plant in ʻEwa Beach, a $536 million project that was completed last year.

Beyond the consent decree requirements, the city’s sewer upgrades also include adding disinfecting ultraviolet light treatment at Kailua’s plant to reduce beach closures.

Over the next 15 years, the department forecasts spending more than $10 billion on sewage projects, including the centerpiece upgrades to the Sand Island facility, which serves residents from Pearl Harbor to East Honolulu.

The Sand Island work is set to cost about $2.5 billion by the federal 2035 deadline, and its first phase, which cost roughly $700 million, is about 80% complete.

Other cities upgraded their sewer systems to secondary treatment decades ago when Congress mandated it through the 1972 Clean Water Act. Organic matter in sewage sucks up precious oxygen in the water where it’s discharged, leaving little for fish. To maintain fish populations, the federal government helped pay some of the cost.

“Prior to that, there were a lot of dead streams,” Babcock told council members Thursday.

Some coastal cities, including Honolulu, successfully requested the EPA to waive this requirement, arguing that the ocean’s immensity could dilute the sewage. That thinking guided policy for decades. But while EPA doesn’t accept those waivers anymore, some council members are skeptical whether secondary treatment is necessary.

Council members Esther Kiaʻāina, Calvin Say, Val Okimoto, Augie Tulba and Council Chair Tommy Waters approved a resolution last December urging the city administration to ask the EPA about amending the consent decree to either extend the deadline or remove the secondary treatment requirement. The other four council members were not present.

Council member Matt Weyer broached the subject on Thursday, asking Babcock what effect secondary treatment has. 

“Without secondary treatment, you have quite a bit less removal of contaminants,” Babcock said in response.

Tupola asked Babcock whether the city knew about any negative health impacts resulting from Sand Island’s lack of secondary treatment. Babcock said he was not aware of any.

She has suggested using other treatment methods and possibly extending the outfall pipe so treated sewage is discharged farther from shore.

Steve Holmes, a former council member who represented both Hawaiʻi’s Thousand Friends and the Sierra Club during consent decree updates, said in an interview that secondary treatment is necessary, pointing to a 1996 study that confirmed the presence of pathogens on the surface where Sand Island discharged its sewage.

That study led to the installation of ultraviolet treatment at Sand Island. 

Holmes would prefer if the upgrades didn’t cost families so much money in sewer fees, but he said the consent decree is firm in its requirements.

Renegotiating with the EPA wouldn’t be without precedent. Kansas City, Missouri, did it with its own consent decree in 2021, arguing that instead of drastically increasing sewer rates to pay for upgrades in the form of manmade pipes, it could use cheaper, more organic technology.

The most viable option would be for Honolulu to propose some other method that would be more effective than secondary treatment, and Tupola has referenced the city’s cesspool conversion effort as one example. That might get the city an extension, Babcock said, though he wasn’t optimistic it would let the city totally off the hook for secondary treatment.

He said the city last tried to reopen negotiations with the EPA in 2021, when the Sand Island secondary treatment upgrade was essentially all that remained to comply with the consent decree.

“The answer,” he said, “was absolutely no.”

Disagreement Over How To Pay

The massive increase in spending necessitates a massive increase in revenue, city officials say. The administration’s original proposal would have more than doubled sewer costs over 10 years for an average single family home.

As currently written, the rate increases would be lower than that and spread over the course of six years, with high-use households paying higher rates than low-use households in an attempt to incentivize less water use. 

A family’s sewer bill is the sum of a base charge plus a volumetric charge that tracks how much water the family sends into the sewage system.

To gauge this amount, it assumes 80% of water pumped into the house ends up in the sewage system, with the other 20% used for things like gardening and drinking water.

In versions proposed by Tupola and council member Tyler Dos Santos-Tam, the volumetric charge is scheduled to increase while the base charge is scheduled to decrease. In Waters’ version, the base charge is scheduled to increase too, but the volumetric charge’s increase would be lower.

Dos Santos-Tam’s version is how the bill is currently written. If it passes, the median single family home that uses 6,000 gallons of water each month would see its monthly bill go from about $100 to about $161. It also would give financial relief to some households through a customer assistance program, the details of which would be worked out by the Department of Environmental Services.

Waters and Tupola have been adamant about finding other ways to pay for the upgrades. 

Babcock and Andy Kawano, the city budget director, said sewer upgrades should be funded purely through sewer rates. While sewage systems are often financially self-sustaining – a dynamic the budget director wants to keep – Waters pitched paying for the upgrades using other sources of money, like the city’s transient accommodations tax.

“Is it conventional?” he said at Thursday’s committee meeting. “No. Is it bold? Yes. Is it necessary? Absolutely.” 

Kawano said that change could lower the city’s bond rating, making it more expensive to borrow money for future projects. 

But Waters framed the sewer fee issue as a question of courage. He invoked Nainoa Thompson, the famed Hōkūleʻa captain who leads the Polynesian Voyaging Society and who spoke at the council’s March monthly meeting. 

“Nainoa reminded us that storms are inevitable,” Waters said. “Not just ones that we can see on radar, but also those rooted in complexity, uncertainty and fear.”

Civil Beat’s community health coverage is supported in part by the Atherton Family Foundation.