Decision On Aquifer Designation Expected Next Month

A controversial decision on whether to designate a 14,000-square-mile area of Eastern Washington as the only source of drinking water for the region is expected next month, officials said Tuesday.

More than a year after the Environmental Protection Agency originally planned to decide the issue, Regional Administrator Chuck Clarke in Seattle will make an announcement by the end of June, EPA and state officials said.

The agency was asked to determine that a massive underground reservoir lies under the entire region and that nearly nine of 10 people within its boundaries - about 260,000 people - would have no alternate drinking-water source should it become contaminated.

A sole-source designation would allow EPA review of any federally funded project that might pollute drinking water in all or portions of 10 counties in the Eastern Columbia Plateau of Eastern Washington and north-central Idaho.

Clarke is expected to meet in the next few weeks with heads of the state departments of Ecology, Health and Agriculture before publicly disclosing his final decision in late June, said Kirk Cook, an Ecology water quality hydrogeologist and Scott Downey, EPA project coordinator.

EPA officials insist they have not made a decision, but indications are that the agency will recommend the designation.

“We’ve been consistent all along. It’s a technically based decision,” Downey said. “Chuck’s not going to make a decision if he doesn’t feel it’s in the public interest.”

Cook said the EPA’s technical staff will recommend designation, “but a lot will depend on results of Chuck Clarke’s discussions with the various directors” of state agencies.

State and local officials have criticized a sole-source designation for the 8.5 million-acre Eastern Columbia Plateau, and members of both states’ congressional delegations have demanded the project be stopped.

Farmers are concerned the move could limit use of chemicals and fertilizers. Some landowners worry it could bury future development in federal regulations.

“This recommendation, if and when made, is uncalled for and serves no purpose other than to expand the power and authority of a federal agency,” Washington State Farm Bureau president Steve Appel said in a letter sent Monday to the state’s congressional delegation.

The EPA staff “has apparently chosen to ignore the recommendations of a scientific Peer Review Panel the agency convened in 1995 to review the data to be used to support the decision,” Appel wrote.

“The panel…unanimously agreed EPA data did not support the designation.”

The EPA notes it has designated a dozen aquifers as the sole source of water for hundreds of thousands of people in its fourstate Northwest region, but has asked for review of only two of 48 federally funded projects in those areas in the last three years.