The short version
For years, Cape Cod towns wrote wastewater plans that then failed to win funding at Town Meeting, and little got built. Prompted by a lawsuit, the state gave the Cape Cod Commission 12 months to update the region’s 1978 Section 208 water quality plan. The Commission and a mediation firm, the Consensus Building Institute, built the update around a large public process organized by watershed rather than by town. This paper, written by people who led that work, describes how it was done, what came out of it, and what they would do differently.
What the researchers did
The paper is a case study written by a Cape Cod Commission planner, a facilitator from the Consensus Building Institute and an EPA social scientist. It walks through each piece of the engagement process:
- Weekend listening sessions after the Commission’s 2012 “Losing Cape Cod” call to action, then seven focus groups to learn what was really holding things up.
- Eleven watershed working groups of 15 to 25 members each (officials, town staff, businesses, realtors, builders, environmental groups and residents), followed by four subregional groups that met 12 times in spring 2014.
- An expert panel that reviewed a “Technologies Matrix” of 67 ways to reduce, remove or restore nitrogen, from sewers to aquaculture.
- Online tools, including a planning game that drew 1,449 registrants, the WatershedMVP scenario tool, and yearly Cape-wide summits.
What they found
- Awareness wasn’t the main obstacle. The early assessment found people mostly knew there was a problem. What held them back was cost, too few technology options, rules that didn’t fit, and fear that the region would impose solutions on towns.
- Water ignores town lines. About two-thirds of the Cape’s 53 embayment watersheds cross town boundaries, yet state loan rules pushed each town to plan on its own. Organizing groups by watershed got people thinking across those lines.
- A big effort. About 170 stakeholders took part and 80 public meetings were held in the 12 months it took to draft the plan.
- Local choice, regional framework. Rather than prescribe one solution, the plan set ground rules and tools so each town could choose its own mix. One guiding principle, as the paper quotes it:
If a solution isn’t affordable, it isn’t doable
(Perry et al., 2020). Groups broadly backed piloting and monitoring newer methods alongside sewers, with a fallback to proven methods if they fail. - Progress since. The authors report about 990 million gallons of wastewater collected each year from about 7,700 parcels, 40 pilot projects using non-traditional methods, $7 million in state and federal grants, a new Cape Cod and Islands Water Protection Fund, and more than $270 million approved by Cape communities. Nine towns had signed agreements to cooperate in shared watersheds, and the first watershed-wide permit was issued for Pleasant Bay in 2018.
- A town-level example. After its sewer plan repeatedly failed at Town Meeting, Orleans ran its own consensus process. It led to a hybrid plan, $1 million approved unanimously in 2015, and $47 million for a downtown sewer in May 2019.
- Not everyone was convinced. Some stakeholders wanted firmer top-down action, cooperation across town lines was uneven, and the authors say they could have pushed watershed collaboration harder from the start.
What it means for Waquoit Bay today
Waquoit Bay’s watershed crosses town lines, so the paper’s central lesson applies directly: Falmouth and Mashpee each control part of the solution, and progress depends on the towns working together and on residents trusting the process. The Pleasant Bay watershed permit and the Orleans turnaround are examples of what that cooperation can produce. Bear in mind that the authors helped run the process they are describing, so this is an insider’s account rather than an independent evaluation.
For what the plan itself says, see our guide to the 2015 Section 208 Plan and the 2021 progress report to EPA.
Read the paper
Perry, E. S., Smith, S. N., & Mulvaney, K. K. (2020). Designing solutions for clean water on Cape Cod: Engaging communities to improve decision making. Ocean & Coastal Management, 183, 104998. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ocecoaman.2019.104998
License: The published article is copyrighted by its publisher, Elsevier, and is not openly licensed, so we link to it rather than host a copy. EPA’s public-access author manuscript is free to read on PubMed Central (linked below). The card image is a screenshot of that PubMed Central page.
Drafted with AI assistance from the linked source.
