‘We can make what's happened better’: Lehigh Valley officials gather for sustainability summit

NORTH WHITEHALL TWP., Pa. — Development and the environment can co-exist, Becky Bradley said Friday morning.

But it’ll take work.

“The reality is we can't fight what has already happened,” said Bradley, executive director of the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission.

“But we can make what's happened better — and we can do that by leveraging our public resources in a smarter way.”

Economic and industry leaders from across the region on Friday gathered at The Club at Twin Lakes for this year’s Lehigh Valley Sustainability Summit, led by the Greater Lehigh Valley Chamber of Commerce and the Sustainable Energy Fund.

In addition to networking during the breakfast meeting, several regional officials gave presentations on upcoming projects, as well as efforts to mitigate the impacts of climate change.

John Costlow, chief executive officer of the Sustainable Energy Fund, said the idea of sustainability has “grown and morphed” over the years.

“If you go out and plant trees, they say, ‘Well, you're being sustainable,'" Costlow said. "But you're not really being sustainable. You're being restorative or you're being regenerative.

"And that's really the next front. That's the next front we're going down, is regeneration.

“When we talk about regeneration, we're talking about restoring the environment. But it's not just the environment, it's all your stakeholders.”

‘A lot of challenges’

Of the dozens of audience members, about half raised their hand when asked if they lived in one of the 15 municipalities — Allentown, Emmaus, Macungie; Salisbury and South Whitehall townships, among others — served by the Lehigh County Authority’s Kline's Island Sewer System, or KISS.

“We're providing service for 32 million gallons per day of wastewater treatment,” Lehigh County Authority Chief Executive Officer Liesel Gross said.

“Our system is also very old. Some of the components are 100 years old. The wastewater plant in Allentown was constructed and went online in 1928. So major restoration's needed there after 100 years of service.

“The 1,000 miles of sewer line that run under our streets through these communities are aging and are bringing a lot of challenges to the operation of the system.”

The authority in November announced a 10-year, $600 million plan to fix aging water and wastewater infrastructure.

Projects include upgrades to Kline’s Island on Union Street in Allentown and the authority's industrial pretreatment plant in Fogelsville, as well as pipe and pump expansions.

In addition, each municipality has its own sewer collection system that needs to be upgraded.

“Almost a full third of the water that we're treating in Allentown is groundwater that enters the pipe every single day,” Gross said.

“That is enormous. That is a huge indication of leakage into the system.

And then, when it rains, like it has been quite a lot recently, the system leaks to such a degree that we see spikes of water coming to Kline’s Island up to 160 million gallons per day.”

‘The single largest investment’

The problem is that the plant can only treat about half of that, she said.

“When we can't treat what's coming to the plant, it goes out,” she said. “It goes out manholes along the Little Lehigh Creek, it goes out at the plant itself and, occasionally, unfortunately, it may go out in someone's basement.

"So absolutely a problem that must be solved.”

A breakdown of the more-than-half-billion-dollar price tag included a breakdown by regional and municipal-specific components.

The former includes: $51 million for the Kline’s Island Wastewater Treatment Plant, $267 million for the pretreatment plant, which is still under review, $23 million to $30 million for an interceptor for the Little Lehigh and $76 million to $98 million for an interceptor in the Western Lehigh.

The latter includes: $90 million flood municipal sewer rehabilitation programs and $54 million to $58 million for other municipal interceptors.

After a round of public meetings at the end of last year, the plan is moving forward, Gross said.

The next steps for officials include evaluating financial impacts and sewer rate projections, as well as incorporating public input into final plan documents.

The plan must be submitted to the state Department of Environmental Protection by March 2025.

“It is the single-largest investment we will make in Lehigh County on environmental protection and public health — $600 million, specifically for protecting the environment and for protecting public health,” Gross said. “It's huge.

“If we look at it that way, I hope we can manage to figure a way to make it happen.”

‘Work together’

After awarding the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission $1 million last year to create a priority climate action plan, federal officials also gave it a tight deadline — five months.

“It's totally bananas,” Bradley said. “In the long-run-planning world, we’d need two years, but that didn't happen. We worked with this group to come together and help us to hammer this out.”

The commission submitted the plan, focused on transportation decarbonization, March 1 to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The plan seeks to cut 300,000 metric tons of carbon emissions by 2030. Officials then had a month to request implementation grant funding.

Working with the state Transportation Department, the LVPC applied for $115 million to reduce stormwater on major roadways throughout the region, retrofitting heavy traffic corridors with trees and other vegetation to capture carbon emissions and reduce landscaping work.

‘Actually Work together’

“We have more vehicles on Route 22 and more vehicles on Route 33 than we do on an interstate highway,” Bradley said. “We wanted to look at interchanges and the connections between those.”

Locations earmarked for greening include an acre at Route 378 at Eighth Avenue in Bethlehem; 100 acres at “the mother of all interchanges,” at Routes 22 and 33; 20 acres at Routes 513 and 33; and almost 60 acres at William Penn Highway and Route 33.

“There's really no buffering there along Route 33, so that enhances noise," Bradley said. "It doesn't look good. It makes the buildings look even bigger.

“And it really compounds that feeling that we're making choices between our agricultural industrial economy and our built industrial economy.

“We don't necessarily have to make those choices if we put it through a different lens, and really look at the ecosystem of how our economy and the environment actually work together.”