NEWPORT — Four citizen activists, joined by two environmental organizations, filed a federal lawsuit yesterday to stop the city from fouling the harbor and local beaches with pollution. The group announced it will soon sue Middletown over its discharges too.

“Newport’s beaches and Newport Harbor are iconic waterways. They are really both local and national treasures. Unfortunately, partially treated sewage and storm water have caused literally hundreds of swimming advisories, beach closures and warnings,” Matt Auten, an advocate for Environment Rhode Island, said yesterday while standing on the shore of Easton’s Beach, also known as First Beach.

Behind him, red flags flapped in the wind, warning bathers not to go into the water at the Middletown end, known as Atlantic Beach, due to high bacteria counts. [The beach, closed since the previous day, would reopen later in the afternoon]. A stream close to where Auten stood is suspected of carrying contaminants to the beach from elsewhere in the city.

Environment Rhode Island filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court, in Providence, with four Newport activists who refer to themselves as the “Sewer Rats.” The four residents were successful two years ago in placing a referendum on an election ballot — and winning voter approval — to ban new sewer hookups until the city went 90 days without violating its discharge permit. That ban has ended.

“We’re very weary with the city of Newport just not doing enough for the water. They seem to be much more concerned, for example, with the state of the roads and the potholes than they are with the water. But people come to the ocean state for the oceans, not the roads,” said Henry Rosemont Jr., one of the citizen plaintiffs. “We’re obviously not trying to get any money from the city by doing this.”

What the group is seeking, with the legal assistance of the Boston-based National Environmental Law Center, are out-of-court settlements with Newport and Middletown.

“Environment Rhode Island and the four Newport residents have been working with the town and the city for years to try to end these pollution problems. Neither the city nor the town have taken adequate steps at this point,” said Theresa Labriola, the law center’s staff attorney. “Our goal is to come up with an enforceable resolution to this problem with a date certain when the pollution will end.”

She said that the U.S. Clean Water Act empowers citizens affected by pollution to bring lawsuits, called “enforcement actions,” in federal court. The suit names not only the city, but Earth Tech, the company that operates the city’s sewage treatment systems. She said the goal of the lawsuit is to force the city to enter into a legally binding consent decree that specifies when and what the city will do about the pollution problem.

Newport Mayor Stephen C. Waluk vigorously objected to the lawsuit yesterday.

“We are doing everything we can to clean up the situation. We have been successful so far, but we have a long way to go,” he said. “It takes time. We are a municipality with a lot of different problems. We only have so much money…

“The time and money and effort we spend on the lawsuit takes away from the time, money and effort we could be using to clean up the harbor and the beaches,” he said, adding that negative publicity “discourages people from coming to the city,” which hurts businesses and Newporters. “I’m really upset about it.”

Just up the stream from where Auten was standing, for example, is the proposed site of an ultraviolet system that the city has hired a consultant to design. It would be used to disinfect the water before it carries fecal contaminants to the beach.

“It’s highly frustrating because we are making progress on any numbers of fronts when it comes to cleaning up the beaches, making infrastructure repairs, cutting down on CSO (combined sewer overflow) events and we’re doing water-quality testing both in the harbor and at Easton’s Beach, and these environmental ambulance chasers show up on the scene. They are provoked by the same people who brought us the sewer moratorium, which was irrelevant and ineffective.”

The moratorium generated a lot of publicity about the sewer issue, but did not appear to block any actual development while it was in effect.

“People have been talking about this, going before the City Council for years,” said Burt Hoffman, one of the citizen plaintiffs, “and they sit there.”

Their response to the problem is “it’s the rain, the rain, the rain,” as in sewage overflows caused when combined storm water and sewage systems become inundated. Referring to the red flags waving on the beach yesterday, long since any major precipitation, Hoffman said, “Perfect example, it’s much more than the rain.”

Hoffman noted that Rhode Island’s congressional delegation “is in an extraordinary position to help. … It’s just incredulous no one is asking them.”

Labriola summarized the types of incidents in which the city has violated its discharge permit conditions, including discharges from its two CSO plants and its main wastewater treatment plant. The main plant, she said, is only a couple of hundred yards away from a harbor pier where city youths like to go swimming. At the other end of the harbor, she said, is King Park Beach, closed for four years because of pollution concerns.

She placed some blame on the state Department of Environmental Management, which she said has allowed the violations to continue while the city works with a consultant on addressing the issue. The city has provided DEM with updates on the work it has accomplished and the findings of its studies.

“It’s a case of enforcement discretion. You can be given a certain amount of time [to remedy a problem],” Labriola said, but she added, “This is an endless amount of time.”

Labriola said her nonprofit organization, after being involved in pollution litigation relating to the Bradford Dyeing Association in Westerly, was looking for other cases of illegal discharges. The group was in touch with Auten at about the same time that the Sewer Rats were trying to interest Environment Rhode Island in Newport’s problems.

“Everybody in Rhode Island lives within 20 miles of the ocean. Many people like myself live here because of the ocean,” said Henry T. Wrobel, one of the Newport activists. “It’s just not right that we, who have possibly one of the nicest oceanfronts in the entire country, are polluting it.”

rsalit@projo.com