The greatest environmental and financial challenge currently facing Cape Cod is addressing our unmet wastewater management needs. As your State Senator one of my top priorities will be to work with Cape Cod town officials and other interested parties to meet this challenge.

The need to make significant improvements in our ability to meet wastewater standards is clear: shellfish beds are closed, murky water and dying fauna and flora are increasingly more common, the protection of our critical source of drinking water is becoming more difficult and expensive, and more and more beaches need to be closed periodically. These are issues that will not go away on their own.  Deferred action will result in these problems becoming more intractable and ultimately more expensive to solve.

Addressing this critical environmental issue will benefit everyone who lives on the Cape and those who visit our wonderful part of the world. When we are successful we will have:

• Adequately protected clean drinking water resources;
• Better protected public health and improved public sanitation;
• Renewed and protected sensitive saltwater and freshwater resources;
• Permitted, responsible economic growth; and,
• Compliance with federal and state clean water laws.

This is an expensive undertaking but we need to move forward with determination. I accept the personal challenge of working with Cape Cod leaders, and in conjunction with my colleagues in the State Senate, to help find federal and state funding to defray a portion of the capital cost of the program. This is only fair, because we are constrained to meet federal and state laws and regulations. I will insist that the best science and most cost-effective technology be applied to meet those clean water standards.