Dishonorable Discharge

Eleven-year-old Anthony Kimball's neighborhood offers few places to play. He lives in Rosedale, a working-class district in southeast Kansas City, Kansas. Some days he hops on a bike and winds his way to the park at Southwest Boulevard and Eighth Street, where he usually can find kids of all ages squeezing every drop of fun out of the day.

But come summer, when the sun blasts the humid air up into the triple digits, this patch of dirt and pavement will lose popularity.

Anthony and some of his young neighbors will flock to one of Rosedale's few natural resources: Turkey Creek, a ribbon of rocks and ripples that flanks the neighborhood's edge. Anthony has been down to the creek's craggy banks a couple of times since his family moved here a few months ago. He mucked around the banks on his bike, lobbed rocks into the gentle current. "My friends go swimming there in the summer," he says, anticipating the day he'll join them, once school's out. "Probably everybody in the neighborhood swims down there."

When Anthony and his buddies strip down and jump into one of the deep spots, they'll be dunking their heads and scuffed knees into effluent from a sewage plant: More than 90 percent of the water flowing through Wyandotte County's stretch of Turkey Creek flows from hundreds of thousands of drains and toilets in the wealthier Johnson County.

Hearing this, Anthony scrunches his face in disgust and revises his summer plans: "I don't want to go swimming there."

Johnson County is required by federal and state laws to disinfect and treat its wastewater before pumping it back into the environment. But examining the track record of this particular wastewater facility, the Pitchfound ample evidence to suggest that Anthony's sudden change of plans is probably wise.

John Metzler kneels near the edge of Turkey Creek and slips a hand into the dark, green water. "Be my guest," he says. "Take a dip." Several dozen yards upstream, a steady blast of wastewater pummels the creek, kicking up piles of dirty foam. All of it -- 15 million gallons per day -- is from the Nelson Complex, a sewage-treatment facility that serves some 130,000 residents in Mission, Merriam, Shawnee and Overland Park. It consists of two sewage plants, one built in 1947, the other in 1960. They both operate virtually within spitting distance of the Wyandotte County line and pour their waste out a single pipe.

As Johnson County's chief wastewater engineer, Metzler helps oversee operations at the plant. He casually rubs the creek water from his hand and acknowledges that virtually every drop comes from his plant -- "We're probably 90 percent of the stream most of the time" -- but he vouches for its cleanliness: "Basically what we pump out is a clean stream."

Yet he knows some doubt his claim; the Nelson Complex has been operating under a permit that expired ten years ago.

The permit is essentially a license to pollute within certain limits set by the Kansas Department of Health and Environment. It and other state agencies are delegated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to enforce the Clean Water Act, which Congress first passed in 1972.

Since the Nelson Complex's permit expired, state and federal water-quality standards have been amended several times in an ongoing effort to protect the environment. But until its permit is renewed, the Nelson Complex remains beholden only to the older, weaker laws.

"Frankly, it looks bad," Metzler concedes. But, he adds, that doesn't mean the situation actually is bad. During the past ten years, he says, Johnson County has spent millions to upgrade its facilities and improve the quality of the effluent it exports to Wyandotte County, where the per capita income is about half of Johnson County's. The enhancements include a new ultraviolet disinfecting system, which will zap bacteria just as effectively as chlorine without harming aquatic life, as the chemical does.

But area environmentalists are skeptical. That's because almost seven years ago the EPA formally objected to a permit Kansas regulators drafted for the Nelson Complex -- a "highly unusual" bureaucratic move, according to Charles Benjamin, a Lawrence-based lawyer who works on behalf of the Sierra Club. In the nearly thirty years Kansas has been authorized to issue and oversee permits, this is the only one in Kansas the EPA has officially rejected. "That says to me that something has been going on with this permit," Benjamin says. "Kansas must not have been doing a good job of enforcing the Clean Water Act at the Nelson Complex."

Federal officials confirm his assessment. "EPA believes that the permit as proposed ... wasn't protective enough for the waters of Kansas," says Mary Mindrup, manager of the permitting program for the EPA's Region VII, which covers Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska and Iowa.

The EPA's objection centers on one issue: "acute whole effluent toxicity," or WET, which is the measure of effluent's danger to living things. WET is determined in a simple, straightforward way: living creatures -- specifically minnows and water fleas -- are exposed to various concentrations of the effluent. If they die, the effluent is acutely toxic.