September 2025 - MABA Biosolids Spotlight: SPOTLIGHT on the MABA Origin Story
September 2025 - MABA Biosolids Spotlight
Provided to MABA members by Bill Toffey, Effluential Synergies, LLC
SPOTLIGHT on the MABA Origin Story
The year 1997 was a tough one for biosolids practitioners on every front. In hindsight, any optimism that might have been felt from the mostly positive findings of the 1996 report by the National Research Council (NRC) titled “Use of Reclaimed Water and Sludge in Food Crop Production” had been offset by many other struggles. The NRC report was weighty, but it was not as attuned to popular culture than had been the 1995 book “Toxic Sludge is Good For You: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry.” This book had pilloried the Water Environment Federation for its 1991 introduction of the new term of “biosolids” and had tagged as greenwashing the US EPA funded Powell Tate communications plan to “sell sludge.” In mid-1997 came the "The Case for Caution: Recommendations for Land Application of Sewage Sludge and an Appraisal of the U.S. EPA's Part 503 Sludge Rules" which enjoyed the imprimatur of the renowned Cornell University, and it was immediately popular with the anti-biosolids activists. “Case for Caution” also stoked new fire under two roundly disputed, but media-charged claims of death-by-biosolids, both allegedly occurring in 1994, of 26-year-old Shayne Conner in New Hampshire and of 11-year-old son Tony Behun in Pennsylvania. These East Coast stories compounded the “deadly deceit” reports coming out of the State of Washington about the Zander farm’s sick cows and farmers. Making matters even worse, David Lewis, a senior EPA microbiologist, had been working within his agency and publicly badmouthing his agency’s new biosolids rules, and articles by Caroline Snyder, a college professor in New Hampshire with a Harvard PhD, reached a national audience to claim scientific malfeasance and cover up. Support for biosolids recycling was on its heels in 1997.
Pushing back against this tide was the “Regional Biosolids Information Networks Workshop: Investing in Success.” Held over a full two days on June 11 and 12, 1997, in Seattle, hosted by biosolids manager Pete Machno, the workshop featured speakers from Metro Seattle and other wastewater agencies, Washington State regulators, and Oregon and Washington universities. At the table, too, was John Walker, a key EPA central office powerhouse who had provided the funding to build professional capacities. Topics at this workshop included the 1991 background on the establishment of the Northwest Biosolids Management Association (NBMA), its governance, its priorities for professional networking, its programs for public outreach, its research priorities and its involvement in regulatory development. The target audience for the workshop was biosolids leaders from California, the Southeast, the Northeast and the Mid-Atlantic regions. Attendees received a compelling collection of sample bylaws, budgets, job descriptions, and action plans – everything they would need to start new regional associations of their own. The Mid-Atlantic region was represented by four individuals. These included folks from a public agency, an NGO and two service companies.
This is a screenshot of the June 11, 1997, opening of the networking workshop hosted by the Northwest Biosolids Management Association in support of expanding regional biosolids associations.
This formative networking meeting in June 1997 would prove instrumental in what came next in the founding of MABA. Two months later, the first week of August 1997, the WEF Residuals and Biosolids Conference, organized jointly with the American Water Works Association, was held in Philadelphia. The call went out for “A Meeting for Mid-Atlantic Residuals and Biosolids Stakeholders” on August 5, 1997, at noon, and Pete Machno was again at the center of this new meeting, with his leadership role as chair of the committee that had several years prior coined the term “biosolids,” helping attract a national audience of biosolids practitioners to this first meeting in the mid-Atlantic. The first name on the sign-in sheet was Pete Machno’s. Thirty-one others signed below him. Of those, 11 would go on to play an active role in the formation of an interim board, four would go back to their other regions to organize, and two were from the regulator community. Notably missing were representatives of a group that was so important to the NBMA, the agricultural researchers.
Ours is a professional community that commits and stays committed, even in the face of a lot of stuff, such as PFAS. Of the 32 at the table in Philadelphia in 1997, eight are still active biosolids practitioners in the MABA region today, 28 years later. At Northwest Biosolids Biofest this year in September 2025, several familiar faces who were there at the start of NBMA in 1991 are still attending, notable personalities like Chuck Henry, Mike Van Ham, Dan Thompson and Kyle Dorsey. Maile Lono-Batura, the longest standing association leader, reported from this year’s Biofest that Henry, Van Ham, Thompson and Dorsey regard the strong and positive collaboration of operators, farmers, scientists and regulators as the reason they have remained engaged over the decades.
A stakeholder meeting was held in Philadelphia on August 5, 1997, two months after the networking workshop, during a lunchtime interlude of the WEF/AWWA joint residuals conference, with Pete Machno presiding during the conversation that would yield MABA and support NEBRA.
During the 16 months following that “stakeholders” meeting, an enormous amount of organizational progress was made. The stakeholders, chaired by Steve Gerwin (WSSC Water), made the essential decision to establish an organization comprised of organizational members, in contrast to individuals, from public and private generators and service companies as voting members, but other environmental groups and regulators as non-voting members. The region served ended up as the states covered by EPA Regions 2 and 3, though it originally did not extend north to New York nor south to Virginia. The founding stakeholders group, which numbered as many as 34, took on the task of creating the original bylaws and articles of incorporation (guided by Bill Toffey and Jane Forste), the key decision points being the membership classes and the size and representation balance on board of trustees. The stakeholder group also appointed a nominations committee (led by Barbara Petroff) to recommend members for the first board and first officers, with the understanding that these positions would be designated “interim” until “incorporation” had been completed.
The first organizing meeting of the MABA stakeholder was held on January 7, 1998, with strong attendance and assignment of roles to cover all aspects of association building.
All things considered, the stakeholders group moved quickly. This progress was summarized in a presentation made by Toffey at the NJWEA annual conference in May 1998 (Evolution of the Mid Atlantic Biosolids (Management) Association). The nominations committee of the stakeholders group went forward to recommend a slate of board members and officers, approved by unanimous consent at its meeting on July 23, 1998, with Bill Toffey elected President, even though he was absent from the meeting. The establishment of the board and officers was then proudly announced to our growing list of biosolids contacts. With a board and officers in place, the application to the IRS for a tax identification number was submitted in September, and on 12-2-1998 the IRS came forth with an EIN.
To promote the regional association initiative, Bill Toffey made a pitch to the largest WEF Member Association in the region, the NJWEA annual conference, in May 1998
One of the early sticking points had been the new organization’s name. The agenda of the first three stakeholders meetings in 1998 included discussions on the name. The sticking point was the word “Management.” Did the term have a sufficiently inclusive connotation, or was it best left out of the name to embrace more inclusivity. At the meeting of May 2, 1998, the stakeholders were still in a deadlock. What better way to break the impasse than a coin toss. With the toss of the coin the new organization became the Mid Atlantic Biosolids Association. Thereby, papers could be completed and the application to the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania for incorporation could be filed, with now four elected officers as signatories. The Pennsylvania Department of State provided official acknowledgement of the Mid-Atlantic Biosolids Association, Inc., as a Domestic Nonprofit Corporation on April 19, 1999. Twenty-two months following the Seattle “Investing in Success” workshop, biosolids practitioners in the mid-Atlantic region were in full operation.
By the end of the year, the state incorporation documents and the federal tax number assignments had been received, which opened up a path to bank accounts, websites and other tangible organization tools.
Second on the sign-in sheet in that August meeting, just under Pete Machno’s signature, was Steve Gerwin. Gerwin had attended the workshop in Seattle and had soaked in the vision put forth by Machno’s team and by Walker, and he was ready to drive the formation of MABA straight out of the gate. “We needed to be out front with the public to make our case for biosolids and become effective communicators with the public and news media,” recalls Gerwin, who was at that time leading biosolids projects for Washington Suburban Sanitary Commission, now WSSC Water. His drive and leadership skill resulted in his selection as chair of the stakeholders group from its first meeting. After completing his time as WSSC Water, Gerwin joined Howard County Bureau of Utilities, and then retired to Florida, enthusiastically providing leadership in local issues, having remarried after being widowed.
Gerwin had brought along to the August gathering his Maryland colleague Al Razik, an engineer with Maryland Environmental Services (MES), who was managing the solids of a dozen facilities and confronting odor problems, regulatory uncertainty and public resistance. Razik recalls it being “excited to meet other biosolids managers from around the Mid Atlantic to discuss the issues we were all facing.” Razik jumped in with a career-long volunteering for MABA, having continued to serve today through his retirement from MES as MABA’s treasurer.
Barbara Petroff had also attended the workshop in Seattle and brought back the NBMA vision to her contacts on the East Coast. Petroff is a person with a natural talent to enroll people in collaborations and with instincts to organize action. At that moment in summer 1997, her role with US Filter was marketing the IPS Composting System, yet she found time to lead both the ad hoc bylaws and nominations committees. “Networking came easy to me,” Barbara explains today. In her persuasive conversations with Guru P. Bose, the manager of the Philadelphia Water Department (PWD) biosolids management unit, Petroff convinced Bose to have his staffer Bill Toffey, PWD’s Utilization Manager, spend considerable time developing the emerging organization. With that understood, Petroff and Gerwin deftly arranged for Toffey to be elected President of the nascent board in a move that also elected 21 board members.
If there was one person responsible for Toffey’s move into a career of biosolids it was Diane Garvey. Garvey had started out as a graduate engineer in PWD’s Sludge Management Unit when Toffey, as a city environmental planner, first engaged with the city’s unfolding biosolids program in the 1980s. In 1997, now as a consulting engineer, Garvey assumed biosolids leadership as chair of the state association’s biosolids committee and had been cochair of the WEF residuals conference. Garvey’s was the third name on the sign-in sheet at the August 5 meeting. She had been impressed at the innovative research and the level of operator training that the NBMA was providing and saw that as a gap in the mid-Atlantic that needed to be filled. She didn’t see the state member association doing that. This was a viewpoint shared also by Trudy Johnston, at the time an engineer with Gannett Fleming, and for long now with Material Matters. Looking back, Johnston recalls: “PWEA was old, farty and backwards and was stopping us from promoting biosolids.”
A national biosolids leader like Garvey, Mark Lang, a biosolids consultant in New York and New England, also attended the August meeting, already strongly committed to regional associations. He saw them as holding promise for effective outreach, as he had reluctantly abandoned his effort to have WEF invest in a national advertising campaign for biosolids using “remnant ad” inserts. “I still see our regional associations as key for public and media outreach. I believe the PFAS issue is an opening for us to explain wastewater and biosolids treatment to the public,” Lang says today.
Whether it was competition or collaboration, the North East Biosolids and Residuals Association (NEBRA) was out in front of MABA by several months in getting itself organized. Shelagh Connelly had just recently formed her own residuals service company, White Mountain Resource Management, Inc., and was pregnant with her second child when she was invited to attend Machno’s June workshop in Seattle. She was very impressed by the commitment in the Northwest to a collaborative approach to research and outreach. On her return to her New Hampshire offices, she assigned her staffer Ned Beecher the responsibility for participating in NEBRA’s organization. Connelly also came to the Philadelphia stakeholders meeting, bringing along with her several of the emerging NEBRA leadership, including Carolyn Jenkins (NEIWPCC), Amy Barad (MWRA) and Ginny Grace (NEFCO).
Connelly sees the project started in 1997 in generational terms. She has never regretted cultivating enthusiasm among young employees. “The best thing for me is looking out during the meetings today and seeing the large number of young women. Felicia Morrissette started with me and I am so proud to see her success with NEFCO, and now to see her role in setting up the Southeast Biosolids Association. We were launched (in 1997) and now we launch the next generation,” Shelagh asserts boldly today.
As we know now, Beecher would go on to become director of NEBRA, and Toffey, after his career at PWD was complete, would become director of MABA. But back in 1998, when it was all so new, Beecher representing NEBRA and Toffey representing MABA, made a joint presentation to the WEF Residuals and Biosolids Conference in 1999 on progress so swiftly made with setting up the two regional associations. In their paper, “Since All Politics is Local, We Must Hang Together,” they finished with a vision for the organizations as “clearing houses and communications hubs, assisted by the power of emerging communications and computing technologies… learning to overlook differences, finding common ground, and ‘hanging together.’”
At the occasion of Northwest Biosolids 35th anniversary, Maile Lono Batura welcomed Bill Toffey, Ned Beecher and Greg Kester (CASA) to express the fun part of regional biosolids associations.
Twenty-seven years later, we are doing this in spades.
In their joint “vision” Beecher and Toffey concluded: “And it is all fun, because we all have enough time to devote to it, because these efforts are all well-funded.”
Well, at least part of that vision came true.
