Guest Opinion: Polluters need to clean up their act

Rocket science is not required to understand what happens when the fox enters the chicken coop. Likewise, when a polluter is put in charge of cleaning up its own mess, it will point fingers elsewhere. And if the polluter happens to own a newspaper, it will use the paper to do the finger-pointing.

Eight sewage and industrial treatment plants pipe pollution into the Spokane River. These plants are owned by the cities of Coeur d’Alene and Post Falls, Hayden Sewer & Water District, Liberty Lake Water & Sewer District, Inland Empire Paper Co., Kaiser Aluminum Corp., the County of Spokane and the City of Spokane. Each of these entities has been granted the extraordinary privilege of putting their waste into the Spokane River.

Inland Empire Paper is an affiliate of The Spokesman-Review.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Washington Department of Ecology are tasked with controlling and cleaning up the pollution. Their job is to issue permits that limit pollution output to what the Spokane River can assimilate, and to ratchet down those quantities over time. If the river is overwhelmed with a particular pollutant, such as PCBs, then the agencies must devise and implement a cleanup plan.

In 2011, Ecology issued permits to the Washington polluters that failed to limit the amount of toxic pollution that each may pipe into the river. EPA recently followed suit, issuing permits to the Idaho dischargers that also place no limits on toxic discharges.

This lack of essential limits on pollutants is especially troubling because the Spokane is overwhelmed with toxic pollution, including PCBs, PBDEs, dioxins, lead, cadmium and zinc. The Department of Health warns not to eat fish from the river.

Instead of limiting the quantity of toxic pollution that each polluter may put into the river, as the law requires, Ecology and EPA ordered the polluters to create the Spokane River Regional Toxics Task Force to assess toxic pollution. Participation is mandatory for the polluters. However there are no timelines, dedicated funding or milestones to determine progress. In fact, the bulk of the funding for this task force comes from Washington taxpayers through Ecology’s budget.

The task force as currently structured is the quintessential fox in the chicken coop.

Pursuant to lawsuits brought by Sierra Club and the Center for Environmental Law & Policy, three courts have ruled that the task force is not a legal substitute for pollution permit limits or the cleanup plan required by water pollution laws. Most recently, the U.S. District Court in Seattle, in a case the Spokane Tribe intervened as a plaintiff, looked closely at the task force process, and rejected it.

The judge found that the task force lacks deadlines, lacks a mechanism to monitor and assess the effectiveness of its work, lacks metrics to measure progress and success, and lacks a clear trigger to determine when its work is accomplished.

The judge further observed that Ecology and EPA have failed for 20 years to make real progress in determining the sources of toxic pollution in the Spokane. This “continual delay of a prioritized (cleanup plan) and detours to illusory alternatives,” (that is, the task force), do not meet the requirements of the Clean Water Act.

The judge summed up by ordering Ecology and EPA to return to the court no later than July 14 with a schedule to create a toxics cleanup plan that includes identified goals, quantifiable metrics to assess progress, regular checkpoints, a reasonable end date at which a cleanup plan will be produced, and commitments to regulate the polluters identified above. The next round of pollution permits will be issued in 2016, which would seem the appropriate time to incorporate specific limits on PCBs.

The Spokane River is an exquisite and irreplaceable part of the quality of life and economic vitality of our region. Half-measures will not do. It’s time to clean up.