Cities Ready To Fight Superfund Plans

The city of Coeur d’Alene is stashing money away to fight any designation of the Coeur d’Alene River Basin as a Superfund site.

Post Falls Mayor Gus Johnson wants his city to do the same thing.

At Johnson’s request, the Post Falls City Council unanimously agreed Tuesday night to set aside up to $5,000 that would pay for attorneys to fight the EPA if it designates the area as a Superfund site. That matches the amount Coeur d’Alene said it is prepared to spend.

The EPA is testing the Spokane River for heavy metal contamination that may have washed downstream from years of mining operations at the Bunker Hill site near Kellogg.

The testing - from Lake Coeur d’Alene to the river’s junction with Lake Roosevelt - has drawn resentment from local officials such as Judy and Johnson who say the EPA is failing to give them adequate input on the testing and on the plans to deal with contamination.

“They’re wasting taxpayers’ dollars if they go out of the original 21-square-mile box. They’re grasping at straws,” Johnson said, adding he doubts the agency will find any problems. If the agency does expand the site, “Then we have to take the taxpayers’ dollars to fight them, and that’s even more money, but we can’t just stand by.”

Judy, Post Falls City Administrator Jim Hammond, Kootenai County Commissioner Dick Panabaker, representatives from the Post Falls and Coeur d’Alene chambers of commerce, and others have been meeting weekly to talk about the testing. They’ve also been discussing a lawsuit against the mining companies by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe and the federal government.

“We all have the same end in sight,” Panabaker said of the group. “We don’t want to see this (a Coeur d’Alene Basin Superfund designation) happen.

“If they decide to declare this a Superfund site, we’ll fight them to the death.”

The Coeur d’Alene City Council closed its doors to the public when it debated whether to spend the public’s money on the EPA fight. The council came out of its closed session with a decision to allocate the money.

It also decided in executive session to create a friend-of-the-court brief on the lawsuit against the mining companies.

The brief states Coeur d’Alene’s position that the river basin was not part of the original Superfund site, said Jerry Mason, Post Falls city attorney.

The EPA, meanwhile, says it is not expanding the Superfund site and has no plans to do so. The site’s size will remain as it has since it was configured in 1983: the 21 square miles around Bunker Hill, EPA representatives say.

“We’re studying the entire area looking for problem areas and places that might be contaminated and then we’re using our Superfund authority to clean up those areas,” said Nancy Wilson, an EPA spokeswoman.

But in Judy’s opinion, “that sounds to me like a classic case of spin control.”

He says the EPA is treating the entire length of the Spokane River and the Coeur d’Alene Basin as a Superfund site.

The agency wants to look like it has been working with local government, Judy said, but “that’s bunk.”

The EPA is working with people in the area, Wilson said, citing public meetings the agency already has conducted and meetings it’s scheduling in Spokane, Coeur d’Alene, Wallace, Harrison and possibly Plummer.

The meetings will take place later this month and in early July and will discuss plans for the agency’s tests.

Testing on the Spokane River is ongoing and results should be back in the fall, Wilson said.

“If I were him (Johnson), I’d just wait until these results were in (before allocating any city money) because Post Falls might not have any problem,” Wilson said.