If we can believe the lore, there once was a time when one could stand atop Holcombe Hill and see Long Island Sound. These days woodlands block the view, and there are only the seagulls in grocery store parking lots to remind us that we live in a coastal state. And that may be part of the problem, according state environmental officials. When Long Island Sound is out of sight, it is also out of mind in a state bent on robust economic development.

But now bacterial contamination, elevated levels of nitrogen, and disappearing marshes have compromised the sound. There are vast “dead zones” where low oxygen levels, known as hypoxia, kill off ecosystems just as surely as the same condition kills off living tissue. The main culprit? Stormwater runoff from Connecticut’s extensive watersheds.

It is a big problem — the sort of problem that requires the kind of big solutions we normally expect of our state and federal governments. The only hitch is that increasingly Hartford and Washington are inclined to kick the considerable cost of those big solutions down the political food chain as far as they can — to the local property taxpayers in Connecticut’s towns and cities.

When the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (DEEP) announced a regulatory program late last year called “The General Permit for the Discharge of Stormwater from Small Municipal Separate Sewer Systems” designed to address the contamination of Long Island Sound, municipal officials quickly sifted through the lofty goals of the proposed regulations to find one of the most burdensome unfunded mandates to come hurtling down from Hartford in years. The immediate and sustained negative reaction from the towns to new rigorous requirements for leaf pickups, catch basin cleanings and monitoring, and street sweeping took on a political pungency that forced DEEP to retreat and reissue a plan that it promised would be less costly and more flexible.

While the precarious health of Long Island Sound is a problem of great complexity and scale, there has to be a responsible recognition that water runs downhill and that every inland pool and eddy is inexorably connected to the sound and its environs. Coordination of the response to the ongoing contamination of this invaluable resource, however, should not depend on a hodgepodge of property tax levies, fee assessments, and other revenue schemes invented under a range of financial pressures specific to 169 different towns and cities.

If the federal EPA and the state DEEP believe this problem needs to be addressed in a coordinated and comprehensive way — and we think it does — then Washington and Hartford should demonstrate the confidence and discipline to finance it. If they think it requires tax levies and fees, then let them impose the taxes and fees and do the political lifting to justify it. Mandating a solution and then leaving it to towns and cities to do the expensive dirty work is not the kind of leadership an issue of this importance and scope requires.