SOUTH PORTLAND, Maine – The Maine Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) has notified the City of South Portland that Willard Beach will be added to DEP’s impaired waters list due to elevated bacteria levels. The City has been partnering with DEP’s Maine Healthy Beaches Program (MHB) since 2003 to monitor and report beach water quality. The designation will have minimal impact on beach goers this summer, but the impaired waters designation will improve the City’s ability to access competitive grants for reducing and eliminating pollution sources to attain water quality standards.
Willard Beach will remain open as usual this summer. The City, in collaboration with MHB, will continue to monitor the water for bacteria twice each week, Memorial Day through Labor Day, as in previous years. MHB posts beach status updates on its website, which beachgoers can link to from the Willard Beach page of the City website. When arriving at Willard, visitors should look for the water quality flag at the main entrance. If the flag is yellow or orange, contact with the water is not advised. The City discourages swimmers from swimming or playing near the stormwater outfall, since it sometimes contains elevated bacteria levels (the City has placed new signage indicating as much). Visitors are also encouraged to remember that “When it rains, it’s poor” – a phrase coined by Upper Merrimack Watershed Association to help beachgoers remember that precipitation negatively impacts water quality.
Willard Beach is being added to the impaired waters list because bacteria concentrations consistently exceed MHB’s beach action value (safe swimming threshold). An urban beach nestled into a residential neighborhood, the Willard Beach watershed is made up of 41% impervious surfaces (i.e. pavement and buildings). This means there is less natural landscape to absorb potential pollutants, like animal feces and lawn chemicals, before they are discharged to the beach water via the stormwater system. The City is also working to upgrade aging piped infrastructure and ensure that wastewater isn’t entering the stormwater system.
Willard Beach will be listed on DEP’s list of impaired waters in Category 5-B: Coastal Designated Beaches Impaired for Bacteria Only based on Enterococci bacteria monitoring data collected from 2018-2022. The report will be available on DEP’s Opportunity for Comment page and DEP will accept public comments from June 15 to July 22, 2024. This classification will make applications that the City submits for DEP funding to develop a plan that establishes a formal framework for identifying and eliminating pollution sources more competitive. The City intends to apply for a Clean Water Act 604(b) grant to create a Watershed Management Plan next year. It will then apply for 319 funding to implement the recommendations of the Watershed Management Plan.
“Access to these critical funding opportunities for Willard Beach will be enhanced,” said the City’s Stormwater Program Coordinator Fred Dillon, who pointed out that the City has been awarded 604(b) and 319 grants for improvements to its Trout Brook. “This has the potential to improve water quality at the beach in the coming years.”
If secured, these grants will bolster the work that the City’s Water Resource Protection Department (WRP), in collaboration with MHB, has conducted over the past decade to identify and eliminate several sources of bacterial contamination in the watershed. The 2023 Willard Beach Watershed Assessment Efforts document details some of this work. For example, in 2022, the City invested roughly $300K to line approximately 1,400 feet of sewer pipes in the Willard Beach watershed to extend infrastructure life and reduce volume of exfiltrating sewage.
More recently, in fall of 2023, WRP replaced the sewer force main that runs along the beach when it was determined to be degraded. The Department also rehabilitated two key sections of aging sewer pipe in the Willard area this past March that may have been contributing to elevated bacteria concentrations on the beach. In April, WRP submitted a grant proposal for the DEP’s Clean Water State Revolving Fund in close collaboration with the Environmental Policy Innovation Center to do more pipe rehabilitation on three key aging segments of storm drains that are located in close proximity to the sewer system and susceptible to potential sewage infiltration. DEP notified the City in May that the proposal was approved, and staff are cautiously optimistic that implementation of this project will decrease bacteria concentrations at Willard Beach.
Dillon will provide an overview of the assessment and maintenance work that WRP has done to date, along with potential next steps, at a City Council workshop on Thursday, June 13, 2024. Meagan Sims, DEP Water Quality Standards Coordinator, will join to answer questions about the impaired waters listing and DEP’s beach water quality monitoring program.
“Willard Beach is extremely important to our community, and City staff take our roles as its stewards seriously,” said Dillon. “We’ll continue pursuing every pathway that leads to cleaner water at the beach.”
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