River plan draws fire

The federal government is being accused of conducting a magic trick in its efforts to make pollution disappear from the Spokane River.

Companies and cities along the river are expected to reduce phosphorus discharges into the river by 95 percent in coming years to prevent summertime algae blooms downstream in Long Lake. A small amount of pollution will still be discharged.

Rather than dole out the remaining pollution allowances equally, critics say the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is effectively giving it all to dischargers in Idaho, putting dischargers in Washington in a tight spot.

“If they’re going to take it all, then Washington doesn’t get any,” said Rick Eichstaedt, an attorney with the Center for Justice in Spokane, a public-interest law firm.

In an effort to accommodate Washington dischargers, the EPA is now considering treating the river as effectively starting fresh at the state line. Doing so would give more leeway to Washington dischargers but would create a river with more pollution than environmentalists had expected.

“It’s fiction – cooking the books – and the river is going to suffer,” Eichstaedt said.

The EPA is in the process of issuing new permits for Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls and Hayden to dump treated sewage effluent into the Spokane River. The proposed discharge permits are believed to include the nation’s most stringent standards for phosphorus, which acts as a fertilizer for algae and ends up robbing oxygen from water downstream in Long Lake. The changes will be phased in over the next decade.

The proposed permits would ensure the Spokane River flows out of Idaho meeting Washington’s water purity standards, but the water would have no additional room for phosphorus from Spokane, Liberty Lake or two other businesses with discharge permits from the Washington Department of Ecology, Eichstaedt said.

One of those businesses is Inland Empire Paper Co., a subsidiary of Cowles Co., which also owns The Spokesman-Review. The other is Kaiser Aluminum.

The city of Spokane expects to spend upwards of $400 million in coming years to upgrade its wastewater treatment plant to meet the tighter standards. Mayor Dennis Hession is concerned the pollution allowances proposed for Idaho “appear to be very generous,” according to a May 17 letter he sent to the EPA.

Should the allowances be granted, “it may not be possible for the City of Spokane or others to meet the goals and targets” of phosphorus reduction, Hession wrote. “This allocation is neither fair nor reasonable.”

The EPA is attempting to balance different water quality standards in Washington and Idaho, said Brian Nickel, an environmental engineer with the agency. Nickel helped write the draft permits. The laws offer no clear guidance, he said, other than requiring water flowing into Washington to meet the downstream state’s purity standards, which it would under the proposed permits.

“There isn’t a clear path for this kind of problem,” Nickel said, referring to the challenges of regulating one waterway in two states. “We had to find a way we thought was defensible and reasonable. … Obviously we know the Idaho dischargers have an effect on Washington.”

The Washington Department of Ecology will use the water quality measured at the state line as the background standard for pollution, said Jani Gilbert, spokeswoman for the agency. “Whatever’s coming over the border, we start there.”

This gives Washington more leeway in granting pollution allowances for the two businesses and two cities in Washington that discharge phosphorus into the river.

“EPA assures us that the Idaho permits will meet Washington state water quality standards in Long Lake and that phosphorous levels at the state line will be very close to what would be in the river if the Idaho dischargers didn’t exist,” Gilbert wrote in a statement explaining the state’s position.

Gilbert also said it was important to consider the big picture: “It’s not a quick fix, but over the life of the plan we will see vast improvements in the water quality of the Spokane River.”

As the plan was being developed, though, a senior water quality analyst with the Washington Department of Ecology wrote a 2005 e-mail message to EPA officials, saying he felt “bewildered about how EPA is dealing with dissolved oxygen issues now. … What is the mechanism for overriding our state standards?”

Eichstaedt said the squabble represents a failure to look at the Spokane River as a resource shared by two states. He called the EPA’s proposal “flawed and unlawful” and said his client, the Sierra Club, is exploring its options. “It’s in everybody’s interest to try to resolve this. Nobody wants uncertainty. The folks who are going to invest millions don’t want uncertainty.”

The agency is expected to issue final permits for the three Idaho dischargers later this summer. Nickel, with the EPA, rejected the notion of the agency taking a narrow view of the river’s health.

“To say … that somebody is getting a better deal, I don’t think that’s true,” Nickel said. “Everyone is going to have to install the best technology they can find for reducing nutrients.”