This story has been updated with a press release from the City of Atlanta and clarifications around email exchanges between Chattahoochee Riverkeeper and City of Atlanta officials.
The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper filed a federal Clean Water Act lawsuit on Thursday against the City of Atlanta over ongoing sewage pollution at its largest wastewater treatment plant.
The Southern Environmental Law Center is representing the non-profit.
The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper (CRK) said in an announcement that it has been testing water samples where the city’s R.M. Clayton Water Reclamation Facility sends treated water back into the river. Since March, CRK director Jason Ulseth said those samples have shown over-legal limits of e. Coli, a bacteria found in feces, and chemicals polluting the water. CRK said these both violate the facility’s permit and the federal Clean Water Act.
“R.M. Clayton, Atlanta’s largest wastewater treatment plant, was mostly offline back in March and it was discharging heavily polluted, partially treated sewage into the Chattahoochee River at 80 million gallons per day,” Ulseth said in an interview with WABE.
He said with the Chattahoochee River flowing at low water, that meant that one gallon out of every five was composed of wastewater downstream of the facility’s output. According to CRK, between July 2023 and July 2024, the facility violated its permit limitations at least 79 times.
The R.M. Clayton is permitted to release up to 100 million gallons of treated wastewater per day, and CRK said that when that wastewater isn’t fully treated, it’s a health risk to the community.
CRK is advising recreators to exercise caution for a 60-mile stretch of the river from the plant’s outfall in Atlanta down to Franklin, Georgia. The treatment center’s outfall, where treated wastewater enters the river, is about a mile downriver of Standing Peachtree Park near S. Atlanta Road.
This contaminated section of the river is entirely underneath the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area. Ulseth emphasized that the ongoing problems don’t impact any of the waters in the national park.
“But there’s still lots of people out here recreating on this part of the river, and with the RiverLands project coming through, there’s going to be more and more people — actually, a canoe launch is going to be installed one mile upstream from here in about two weeks,” Ulseth said.
Road to lawsuit
The City of Atlanta initially said the plant’s failure — and sewage pollution problems — were due to heavy rainfall overwhelming it. Additionally, they said “illicit substances”, meaning a chemical that wasn’t supposed to be flushed into the facility, disrupted the system and caused it to not fully treat the sewage. The City never identified a source of the chemicals, although it said it investigated the matter.
But Ulseth said what’s happening at the R.M. Clayton isn’t a one-off problem.
“There are malfunctions at every single stage of treatment,” Ulseth said.
The Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) conducted an inspection of the plant on March 7, which found many maintenance issues throughout the plant. While the City was already repairing some equipment on site — issues the EPD was already aware of — the inspectors also found several other places of the treatment center that were not functioning.
Ulseth said that after its March findings, operations at the R.M. Clayton don’t seem to have improved. And he said the City’s schedule for getting things back in order isn’t aggressive enough, and that the issue isn’t just mechanical — it’s institutional.
“It’s not a matter of just fixing these broken components and hoping it runs properly for the next 20 years. The consent decree before put all of this infrastructure in place, it was functioning properly, but the city failed to maintain it,” Ulseth said.
He said the City of Atlanta’s own schedule has March 2025 as its earliest date of complying with Clean Water regulations and its permit.
CRK filed a notice of intent to sue in June, a 60-day warning required under the Clean Water Act to give the source of pollution a time period to fix the problem. Ulseth said CRK hoped it would motivate the City to work collaboratively.
“But they have not come to the table,” Ulseth said.
Both the Riverkeeper and the City maintained they tried to work with one another. In early August, the City of Atlanta reached out to CRK after the intent to sue notice, offering to meet, and CRK accepted the invitation. But, Ulseth said they never heard back.
In its press release posted after the lawsuit’s announcement, City officials said they have collaborated with CRK and “have offered to continue to meet with them as recently as last week.”
Chattahoochee Riverkeeper confirmed an email from an official they had not previously spoken to at the City went to their spam inbox last week. Ulseth said CRK is hoping to set up a meeting with the City, but even with the confusion, the facts of the situation do not change their approach to the ongoing problems at the R.M. Clayton.
History of enforcement
The City of Atlanta has already faced penalties due to the sewage contamination.
In late May, the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) fined the City over $163,000, in addition to several requirements to fix equipment in the facility and get e. Coli and other pollutants to legal levels in the river. Ulseth said that since May, e. Coli levels downstream of the R.M. Clayton haven’t improved much.
Ulseth said a federal lawsuit will provide a plan agreed on by both parties, certified by a judge, that has hard enforceable deadlines for compliance and upgrades.
The Chattahoochee Riverkeeper is celebrating its 30th anniversary, making this new federal lawsuit a repeat of its history. The non-profit was founded in 1994 and quickly pursued a federal Clean Water Act lawsuit against the City of Atlanta for repeated sewage spills and ongoing sewage pollution in the river. The agreement that came out of that lawsuit — often referred to in Atlanta simply as “the consent order” — has outlined the required investments and upgrades to Atlanta’s sewage system that have defined the City’s watershed management for decades.
“What we need is another consent decree,” Ulseth said.
CRK will seek an injunction to the ongoing permit violations, as well as civil penalties and attorney’s fees and costs.
The City of Atlanta’s press release stated the City has conducted preventative maintenance to the facility as well as upgrades to equipment. It has also used chlorination to help clean the sewage in its process.
