On March 7, 2025, advocates from many watershed and community groups formed the Coalition to End Sewage Pollution. These organizations include the Mystic River Watershed Association, the Charles River Watershed Association, Alewife Study Group, Green Cambridge, Save the Alewife Brook, and others.
The Coalition works together represent over 100,000 people. We feel our concerns have not been heard by staff at the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority, Cambridge, and Somerville. In particular, there is deep disappointment that sewage project planners have not been transparent about the process used to evaluate sewage elimination alternatives. The project planners have not evaluated the elimination of CSO regulators. In the Recommended Alternatives, project planners have not seriously evaluated meaningful sewer separation and associated green stormwater infrastructure. Project planners have not achieved levels of CSO control that satisfy public health criteria, despite a state-issued Water Quality Variance that requires them to do so.
The Governor’s Biodiversity Conservation Goals for the Commonwealth Report, published in August 2025, specifically calls on the state–including, presumably, the MWRA and the EEA Secretary–to “significantly reduce or eliminate combined-sewer overflows (CSOs).” The current proposal does not come close to eliminating remaining CSOs in Boston rivers. Instead, it proposes dumping considerably more sewage into our beloved water bodies on an annual basis.
The Coalition to End Sewage Pollution has created the Shared Principles and Shared Goals document, available for download here. This community-based plan must guide the project planners in the selection of the Preferred Alternative CSO control plan that will be submitted at the end of this year.