Did Donald Trump Sidestep Manhattan Sewage Standards?

The Republican presidential nominee has a track record on sewage issues, although it is almost never discussed in the campaign.

Back in 1974, when Trump was 28, he acquired control of a property in Manhattan, The Daily Beast reported. “For a song, he had 57 acres of land along the Hudson River that ran 13 blocks from 59th Street to 72nd Street,” the report said. He proposed to build residential apartment buildings and business space on the property.

As the project went under development in the ‘80s and ‘90s, local politicians fought Trump on the grounds that his proposal would overload the capacity of local sewage infrastructure.

“Ruth Messinger, the Manhattan borough president at the time, was adamant that no development would take place on the Trump property without proper sewage treatment for the estimated five million gallons per day his project was expected to generate,” The Daily Beast reported. Messinger and other advocates fought against claims “that the existing sewage plant could handle the flushed toilets and other wastewater from 5,700 new apartments.”

Amid tension between the developer and the city, something shifted: Documents on city sewage flow began showing a drop in volume on the Upper West Side by 24 MGD, resolving the conflict at hand, according to The Daily Beast. It was “a mysterious decline that occurred within the space of a two-hour period,” The Village Voice reported in 1995.

Trump’s critics, including Messinger, dropped their opposition to his development project, according to The Daily Beast.

“After opposing the project, Messinger was now suddenly for it, even... claiming she never called for preventing sewer hookups to Trump’s proposed building. Mary Jo White, the federal prosecutor, suddenly dropped her investigation and still refuses to answer questions about it,” Raw Story reported.

But Rich Herschlag, the former chief borough engineer, developed a theory about the sudden decline in sewage volume.

“It may be the raw sewage was simply diverted into the Hudson River, but Herschlag believes another answer is highly likely. He learned that there are two independent sets of sewage flow data. One is from the collector pipes, the other at the entry to the treatment plant. Herschlag believes someone tampered with the plant intake meter, but neglected to fudge the collector-pipe meters so their numbers would match, either out of hubris — what are the odds someone would compare the two? — or laziness,” The Daily Beast reported.

Trump sold most of his interest in the land to Hong Kong investors in 1997, according to the report. And Herschlag appears to have immortalized his perspective in fiction by writing a novel called The Interceptor.

The novel is about “a sly real estate mogul with a $4 billion deal at stake, a ruthless candidate for mayor in a heated election year and a lone civil engineer who uncovers a secret that could rock the lives of seven million New Yorkers.”

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