EAST ST. JOHNSBURY -- Bill Christiansen couldn't believe it. For decades he's been fighting to clean up the sewage that drains from his home and neighborhood into the Moose River. And for decades he, his neighbors and the town have gotten nowhere.

At a special meeting called by the Selectboard earlier this month, the solution appeared to be at hand. But it turns out the plan doesn't comply with state law, and it requires homeowners to pay the entire cost.

"I am not going to live long enough to see the problem solved,'' a frustrated Christiansen told the selectmen. ''I will be long gone.''

East St. Johnsbury's problem, though extreme, is emblematic of the difficulties other homeowners across Vermont face in trying to solve some of the state's most persistent sewage woes. In more than a dozen locations -- from central villages like East St. Johnsbury and Warren village, to settlements like Shoreham or Colchester on Lake Champlain bays -- Vermont communities are spilling untreated sewage into rivers and lakes.

In so doing, they pose a serious health risk to those who might canoe, fish, or swim in the sewage-polluted waters.

The threat is real. In Warren, for example, when the local planning district tested drinking-water wells last year, 30 percent contained coliform bacteria from human or animal waste contamination.

Nationwide, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that 73,000 Americans are infected and 61 die each year from a virulent form of coliform bacteria. This virulent form sickened people who drank contaminated water last summer in Canada and at a 1999 county fair in New York state.

Lax or reasonable?

Vermonters pride themselves for leading the nation in environmental protection. We were among the first to ban billboards; we were early supporters of the bottle bill; we have an innovative --sometimes controversial -- law, Act 250, that regulates development; we have long supported conservation and preservation of agricultural and forest land.

Keeping raw sewage out of rivers, however, has proved a more difficult task. Chris Kilian of the Conservation Law Foundation is more blunt.

"It is inexcusable in the year 2000, almost 30 years after the initial passage of the Clean Water Act, to have direct discharges of raw sewage into our waters. This is an example of where the Agency of Natural Resources and the Environmental Protection Agency, under the banner of reasonableness, have let municipalities get away with unacceptable pollution.''

The reasons for the problem are many.

The state has been lax in bringing towns into compliance. In some places such as East St. Johnsbury, enforcement orders that penalize towns for inaction have expired without action. State officials say they prefer to nudge people and towns along, rather than force them into drastic and often painful action.

"You can tell people to correct the situation, but if there isn't an identifiable solution, what do they do?'' said Brian Kooiker, with the state's Wastewater Management Division. ''Just saying make it stop doesn't make it stop.''

Generous federal grant money to build sewage treatment plants mostly dried up in the 1980s. Towns now have access to smaller state grants and low-interest loans to help pay for sewage treatment plants. For some towns, that's simply not enough.

In Cabot, for example, where sewage from failed septic systems in the village has gone into the headwaters of the Winooski River for decades, the town was able to clean up the mess only with the help of a special $1.23 million congressional appropriation brokered by Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt. In Shoreham, the town was able to piece together a number of federal grants to pay for part of its $2.5 million treatment plant construction. And in Warren, where the cost of a new sewage treatment plant would have topped $3 million, the town won a $1.5 million federal Environmental Protection Agency grant to test cheaper, smaller, alternative technologies.

When only a few village residents have sewage problems, as in East St. Johnsbury, there's debate about who should pay for the cleanup. Lawmakers approved a change in this last legislative session that allows the state for the first time to make loans to individual homeowners.

That's in keeping with Vermont's generally liberal approach to paying for sewage cleanup, whether from big cities or small farms. In 1988, the Legislature approved a $13 million grant and $26 million in interest-free loans to help Burlington with its $52 million sewer upgrade. More recently, lawmakers have spent $1.5 million of Vermonters' tax dollars over the past five years to help farmers build manure pits and other structures to control farm pollution.

Environmental advocates say that polluters still need to take some responsibility to pay for the fix.

"It is just not fair to say that people in small towns don't want to pay for their pollution problem, so we won't make them,'' Kilian said. ''It is really unfair to the taxpayers of the state and people in cities and towns that have cleaned up their act to let these towns and people who live in them get off the hook.''

Legislative inaction and regulatory problems at the Natural Resources Agency limit alternative technologies that might remedy hard-to-solve septic problems. Efforts to change laws and revamp outdated sewage rules have been bottled up in the Legislature for nearly a decade. Most of state's problem areas are in places where traditional treatment systems can't work otherwise they'd be fixed by now.

No place demonstrates all these failures better than East St. Johnsbury.

Passing the buck

The village of East St. Johnsbury straddles U.S. 2 and the Moose River, about four miles east of the town of St. Johnsbury. The village retains some of its 19th century flavor, with its own white church and a general store. The small, clapboard homes along the river were mostly built in the mid-1800s. The homes' small lots, each with its own drinking water well, make 20th century conventional septic systems unfeasible.

Some lots are less than 200 feet on a side, making it impossible to put a safe distance between a drinking-water well and a septic system. The lots' size and their closeness to the Moose River also make a conventional leachfield unworkable. Some homeowners have managed to build working systems, though these systems wouldn't pass muster under current septic regulations. Some homeowners, like Christiansen, haven't been so lucky.

In 1975, the town of St. Johnsbury commissioned its first study seeking a way to solve East St. Johnsbury's sewage problem. The town solved its own wastewater problems in 1963 when residents built a $2 million sewage treatment plant. Since then, outlying settlements were hooked to the main plant via sewer lines, but the small settlement of East St. Johnsbury was at least three miles from the nearest hookup, so construction of a sewer line seemed too costly to be practical.

The town's consulting engineers, Whitman and Howard, told the Selectboard then what everyone knows now: it's impractical for the homes to have individual septic systems. The only solution, they said, was for the village to build a sewer line and pump station that would send village waste to the town's main treatment plant. That meant more than $1 million to bury pipe and build the equipment for the fix, an expensive proposition even if the whole village of roughly 50 buildings and residences were to be hooked up.

By 1996 -- 20 years later -- the cost had jumped to $2.5 million. Even with state loans and grants, each homeowner would have to pay about $1,000 a year for 20 years. The cost today is expected to be even higher.

Endless cycle

Longtime residents have watched the drama unfold over the decades. Children in East St. Johnsbury have been born, gone through school and become adults while the sewage woes dragged on. Residents have come and gone and died. Townspeople have met countless times, talked, argued and dickered over what to do. The debate took on a predictable pattern: The town would commission a study on ways to clean up the sewage. The study would recommend building a sewer line. The cost would be prohibitive. Everything would stop. There was the 1975 study. There was the January 1986 study by the same engineers. Its recommendations? Construct a sewer line and hook the village to the plant.

But the village didn't want to, or couldn't, pay. The town searched for grant money and cheaper alternatives. It found neither. In 1990, Sean McVeigh, environmental investigator for the state's Environmental Conservation Department, surveyed the village for failed septic systems or systems that piped directly into the Moose River. He found 13, including Christiansen's house, and a used car business and garage owned since 1961 by Kirby resident Rod Lamotte.

In 1993, acting on McVeigh's investigation, the state issued its first enforcement order to the town -- clean up the sewage or face fines of at least $10,000 per day. That order spurred the town to conduct yet another engineering study in 1993 and 1994. Once again came the recommendation: pump the sewage to the main treatment plant.

But once again the town and residents balked at the price: then up to $2.25 million or about $45,000 per home. The Selectboard requested and got several extensions to the enforcement order and eventually tabled the proposal; it was simply too much money.

In 1995, frustrated Selectboard member Gib Handy half-jokingly said the town might be better served by buying the problem homes and tearing them down, since their assessed value was only $1.3 million. Another board member suggested selling the village. By 1996, residents, fed up with the constant debate and distrustful of state officials, refused to let the state and town test well water to see if sewage was polluting area wells.

The state, which issued its enforcement order in 1993 and extended the deadlines in the order twice, allowed the order to expire in 1997 without taking legal action to force the town to act. Marilyn Davis, head of the state's Wastewater Management Division, explained.

When we could have put the pressure on, we didn't,'' Davis said. ''People may feel we cut them too much slack too often, but we try to do the best we can without being heavy handed.''

Another try

Earlier this month, the town held another meeting with village residents. This time, the Selectboard presented a consultant's report that suggested a cheaper fix: individual or small group septic systems for the homes.

The report was three years old. It had been tabled while town and state officials tried to find some money to help. They found some; a $292,500 loan approved in this past legislative session. The Legislature also changed septic laws so that the money, which usually is only available to towns or fire districts, could be made available for St. Johnsbury to loan to individual homeowners at 2 percent interest.

Consulting engineer Stephen Revell, hired by the town, told the residents that his designs would eliminate health risks, and the fixes would be cheaper than hooking up to a sewer line. The catch? None of the systems could comply with existing state law. They could be installed, however, because the homes predated the state's environmental laws.

"The best solution is to hook up to the treatment plant,'' Revell said, to which residents Bob and Betty Hill chorused from the audience, ''That's right! That's right!'

Along with the Hills and a half-dozen other of his fellow village residents, Rod Lamotte listened to Revell's presentation and that of a state official, Eric Blatt, who explained the mechanics of the Legislature's loan. Lamotte wasn't happy.

"Right up until three years ago, it was considered a town project -- why are we considering individual systems now?'' he asked the Selectboard.

Lamotte, 64, told the board he felt betrayed by the town's unwillingness to help pay for building the sewer line.

Former Town Manager ''Dave Clark always told us, .... eventually you'll be part of the system;" Lamotte said.

Front lawn problem

Bill Christiansen listened, and laughed at what he considered the absurdity of the consultant's plan to solve his sewage woes.

"The solution that's offered for my house is to put my septic system on my neighbor's front lawn,'' he told the board. ''I don't think that will work. I thought the town was going to come up with real solutions, not put a septic tank on a neighbor's front lawn. That's B.S.''

The two-hour meeting ended with a pledge from village residents to cooperate with the town and the state. Since the proposed solutions require some homeowners to share leachfields or septic tanks, that pledge was a step forward. But some village homeowners didn't attend the meeting. Without everyone's cooperation, even Revell's solutions won't work.

"We'll just have to keep working on it,'' said Town Manager Mike Welch. Tired, he gave a bemused grin.