House OKs funds for pollution plan

BOISE – After county commissioners for three North Idaho counties backed it, funding to start implementing a pollution management plan for Lake Coeur d’Alene won the support of the Idaho House on Tuesday on a 53-16 vote.

“It’s good news that it passed,” said Kootenai County Commission Chairman Rick Currie. “It is a move in the right direction.”

The budget bill for the state Department of Environmental Quality, a tiny piece of which includes funding authorization to begin implementation of the Coeur d’Alene Lake Management Plan, stalled on Friday after several lawmakers spoke out against the lake plan. On Tuesday, just three North Idaho lawmakers opposed the budget bill.

Leading the dissenters was state Rep. Dick Harwood, R-St. Maries. He was joined by state Reps. Jim Clark, R-Hayden Lake; and Phil Hart, R-Athol. State Rep. Bob Nonini, R-Coeur d’Alene, missed the vote. All other North Idaho House members voted in favor.

State Rep. Frank Henderson, R-Post Falls, told the House, “It has come forward through meetings with the county commissioners, all the affected persons up in that area, and there have been really difficult negotiations. There’s been anger, there’s been satisfaction, there’s been gains.”

Many changes were made in response to public comments, Henderson said, including two key changes made just in recent weeks that won the commissioners’ support. One was deleting the Spokane River from the plan, and the other was setting quarterly meetings between the commissioners of Kootenai, Benewah and Shoshone counties and the plan’s principal authors, the DEQ and the Coeur d’Alene Tribe, to give the counties a voice in how the plan is implemented.

State Rep. Mary Lou Shepherd, D-Prichard, told the House, “I will be supporting this legislation, but I do not feel that it is the perfect fix to the problem. Local government does indeed have a place at the table, but they do not have a vote. If they are the ones being impacted, I feel that they should also have a vote.”

However, she said, “The three counties came together yesterday and they’re all on board now and so am I, and I would urge everyone in here to be able to vote yes.”

State Rep. George Sayler, D-Coeur d’Alene, told the House that his local Chamber of Commerce is in strong support of the bill, as are many in his community. “This is a very important piece of legislation for us,” he said, noting that the lake management plan is the key to preventing an EPA Superfund cleanup of Lake Coeur d’Alene. The plan is aimed, instead, at managing nutrient loading in the lake to keep old mining contamination safely encapsulated in sediments at the lake bottom.

Harwood told the House he still opposes the bill. “I got some really good advice yesterday which I’m probably not gonna take, advice from a good friend of mine, told me to keep quiet and vote no,” Harwood told the House. “I woke up this morning about 12:30 really stewing on this bill. … The thing that come to me was that when a man knows to do what is right and does not do it, to him it is sin.”

Harwood, who said on Friday that he thought the plan would let the Coeur d’Alene Tribe “rule over us that live there,” told the House on Tuesday that he wished the Legislature had gotten to vote on the lake plan, which was developed over the past seven years through negotiations between the state and the tribe with the help of a federal mediator. “Any time you got people telling you you gotta do this and you gotta do this now, you’re gonna lose some liberties,” Harwood said.

The tribe is involved because it owns the southern third of the lake; the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the tribe’s ownership in a landmark ruling in 2001.

Currie said he and the other county commissioners still have concerns about the lake plan, but they support the funding. “I want to be real specific,” he said. “We are working with DEQ and the tribe to work through our differences with the plan. We did agree to support the funding.”

He said, “We were very pleased they pulled the Spokane River out of the plan; it should’ve never been there to begin with.” Most importantly, Currie said, “We feel we’re going to have a say in how those funds are distributed.”

Plus, he noted, “The tribe has stepped up” and committed its own funds.

The Coeur d’Alene Tribe is matching state expenditures to implement the lake management plan. The state is seeking a federal grant to cover its share; under the budget bill, House Bill 276, if the grant doesn’t come through, Idaho’s water pollution control account would be tapped for a little over $300,000 next year to hold up the state’s end of the funding.

The measure now moves to the Senate.