- Jefferson Chalmers residents express health and odor concerns over a new GLWA pump station involves street realignment and building demolition.
- The $138 million project aims to make regional water infrastructure more resilient and help with flood prevention.
- Some residents question the lack of community engagement for a project that GLWA has been planning for years.
Charlotte Finley-Walker is proud of her home on Conner St. in Detroit’s Jefferson Chalmers neighborhood, where she has a fenced-in yard with a garden and space for family cookouts. But she says a new Great Lake Water Authority pump station on Freud St., designed to shore up regional water infrastructure and help with flood prevention, threatens this sanctuary.
“I can’t imagine the smell that is going to leak from that plant,” she told Planet Detroit. “We won’t even be able to open our windows.”
Finley-Walker is a breast cancer survivor, and her husband has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. She fears the plant could add to their health problems. She is also frustrated that she only learned about the project in early March, although GLWA had been buying up property for it for several years.
GLWA representatives say the $138 million project is crucial for flood prevention in the face of climate change. The new facility will help support the Freud Pump Station, which experienced a partial failure during the catastrophic flooding of June 25-26, 2021. They say odors will be contained in the facility and won’t present health issues for the neighborhood.
But residents see the new pump station as another consequence of their downstream location within Metro Detroit’s stormwater system, much of which flows into the area and contributes to localized flooding. They question why the city of Detroit and GLWA didn’t do more outreach for a project with such a large footprint that has been in the works for years.
The new GLWA pump station will move Freud St. to the north for several blocks between Tennessee and Algonquin streets, adding a curve to the otherwise straight thoroughfare. The street will be closed temporarily for the project, which is expected to be completed in 2024. GLWA will demolish or remove five abandoned buildings in the project’s footprint.
“I’m not opposed to the project; I’m opposed to the project’s location,” said Jay Juergensen, a neighborhood resident and head of the Jefferson Chalmers Water Project, a grassroots effort to deal with the neighborhood’s flooding issues. He said he was against locating more industrial facilities in the neighborhood, which was already dealing with pollution from the nearby Stellantis facilities. He said 110 residents have signed a petition opposing the location of the pump station.
Odor is relatively easy to control, according to Bill Shuster, chair of the civil and environmental engineering program at Wayne State University. He said odor may be more of an issue while the system is being built if GLWA tests pumps before the building is completed. Grosse Pointe Park experienced odor problems during the construction of its controversial emergency relief sewer.
What will the new pump station do for the region and Jefferson Chalmers?
Shuster said the neighborhood experiences a high degree of flooding due to its low-lying location next to the Detroit River and because stormwater from much of the metro region collects in infrastructure like the Detroit River Interceptor, which can fill up and contribute to backups in the neighborhood.
It’s unclear how much the new pump station will help Jefferson Chalmers directly with flooding. GLWA spokesperson Stephen Jones said the neighborhood’s combined sewer system feeds directly into the DRI, located underneath East Jefferson Avenue.
The new Freud station will take flows from the Ashland and Fox Creek relief sewers coming from the north and east. This facility will then send dry weather flows onto the DRI, while the existing pump station will send wastewater and stormwater to the Conner Creek Combined Sewer Overflow facility during storms.
Project could add resilience and help with flood prevention
Todd King, system resilience officer for GLWA, said during a March 19 online public hearing that the project would improve the functionality of the Freud Pump Station and support regional flood prevention.
“It doesn’t change the sewershed or where the water is coming from, but it is improving the overall reliability and resiliency of the system,” he said.
Jones said that the new facility will allow the existing Freud station, a block to the west, to be serviced and to focus on diverting stormwater during large rain events. He said that without the new station, the utility would have to use large bypass pumping systems that would be more disruptive because they require generators and hoses or pipes that could disrupt traffic.
GLWA chose the specific location for the project because it allows them to intercept the 16-foot diameter sewers located under Freud St. before they reached the Freud Pump Station, Jones said. He added that other locations for the project were “determined to be impractical for a variety of reasons.”
Paul Ransom, GLWA’s life cycle project manager, said $138 million was made available for the project through Michigan’s Clean Water Revolving Fund. The building will be roughly the same size as the existing three-story pump station, and tree plantings and rain gardens are planned for the surrounding streetscape.
Why wasn’t public outreach done sooner in Jefferson Chalmers?
Juergensen questioned why GLWA had begun talking to neighbors earlier, especially because the utility began planning the project in 2016.
JonesJones said it was necessary for GLWA to delay engagement until they acquired property for the project.
“Property acquisition is necessarily an activity that precedes community engagement to avoid speculators from acquiring the property and elevating costs,” he said.
He added that GLWA has been engaged in outreach, especially since the 2021 floods, which included Freud and Conner pump station improvements. However, it didn’t identify any specific community engagement for the Freud St. project before the March 19 hearing.
At a March 18 meeting of the Detroit City Council Public Health and Safety Committee, Councilmember Gabriela Santiago-Romero asked Detroit Department of Public Works Director Ron Brundidge about concerns that insufficient community outreach had been conducted for the project. The director replied that he was unprepared to discuss the issue in detail.
Tom Stevens, legal policy analyst for the city of Detroit, seemed to reinforce concerns about insufficient outreach for the project, saying, “this probably should be the beginning of a discussion about how this construction is affecting the neighborhood.”
Additional outreach likely won’t be enough for Finley-Walker on Conner St., who said she would like to be paid to relocate if plans for the project move forward. She said she already deals with air pollution in the neighborhood and doesn’t want smells from the pump station added to the mix.
“All I care about is being able to open up my window… and breathe clean air, just like anybody else,” she said.