Swampscott King's Beach Debate Remains Hot Topic For Select Board

SWAMPSCOTT, MA — The ongoing discussion and debate over how to best create and spend funding to clean up King's Beach was once again a focal point of Wednesday night's Select Board meeting ahead of the creation of a new Stormwater & Wastewater Committee in town.

Select Board members MaryEllen Fletcher and Doug Thompson pushed for most — if not all — of available grant money to be spent on source elimination of waste in the town's sewer system, while Town Administrator Sean Fitzgerald again cautioned that while the town will continue with source-elimination efforts those alone have done little to make King's Beach any safer in recent years.

"We've made the most amount of progress over the past couple of years that the town has ever made on really focusing in on how to really fix this problem," Fitzgerald said. "I want everybody pulling their oar in the right direction.

"I want (the state Department of Environmental Protection) to be more aggressive showing up in the halls of Congress asking for, not $2 million — we need $50 million. Anyone who thinks we can incrementally solve this problem over the next 10 years by putting $2 million in here and $2 million there, this needs a massive investment in state or federal dollars."

(Also on Patch: Swampscott's King's Beach Cleanup Faces Daunting Challenges)

Fitzgerald said he understands the frustration with the pace of the progress but that he is frustrated that "we continue to look at this issue through a lens that is too narrow."

"We need to put together regional coalitions to look at alternatives to doing the same thing every year," Fitzgerald said, "which is putting us on a race to the bottom."

Yet, while public commenters and Select Board members have expressed support for more wide-ranging fixes such as a proposed UV light bacteria elimination system and a long outfall from Stacey's Book into the ocean to dilute the waste, they continue to press for the source elimination — lining pipes and identifying contamination leaks — as the one thing Swampscott can do on its own in more immediate ways to try to put at least some type of a dent in the contamination that made the beach essentially unusable during a summer of heavy rainfall.

"My big concern here is that everything is going this way, this way, this way and we're not having really big conversations about where the governing board (Select Board) is saying where we want to go with this," Fletcher said.

"I do think you are spending an enormous amount of energy," Thompson told Fitzgerald. "But I don't think we're all in agreement about where that energy should go. We do need to put the vast majority of that (recent $2.5 million grant), if not all of it, into source elimination."

Select Board member Peter Spellios, noting that King's Beach will once again be on the Board's agenda for discussion during the Nov. 15 meeting in a way it was not on Wednesday night despite the 45-minute back and forth, indicated that while he was also in favor of guiding available resources to source elimination, the shared outfall with the city of Lynn means Swampscott cannot fix the problem on its own.

"We can do 100 percent replacement of pipe and King's Beach is still not accessible because we are not the sole source," Spellios said. "We are not living by ourselves here. We are living with Lynn.

"We have to fix our stuff but I am not going to be satisfied when we get to the end of it and we find out that King's Beach is still not accessible."

Select Board member Katie Phelan also raised concerns that a September report on issues facing King's Beach and the town's sewer asset management included pollution at Fisherman's Beach as well.

The Select Board is in the process of establishing the town's Stormwater & Wastewater Committee. The Committee will help to advise the Select Board on activities and needs related to the town's stormwater and wastewater systems.

Committee members will help guide ongoing improvements, operation, and expansion of the infrastructure system.

"I want to see that beach clean," Fitzgerald said. "I want to see if safe for everybody. I get people's frustration. I want to see more people frustrated. It should not be left for a future generation. It should be fixed in this generation."

"I am not looking to do little. I am looking to do a lot more."

(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)