Governor Signs Sewer Exemption Spokane Officials Fail In Last-Minute Effort To Derail Legislation Over Mobile Home Rules

Despite last-minute lobbying, Gov. Gary Locke has signed a bill that Spokane city and county officials say undermines efforts to protect drinking water.

The new law, which unanimously passed both houses of the Legislature, exempts existing mobile home parks from connecting to public sewers, as long as their septic tanks don’t fail. It was sponsored by Republican Reps.

Duane Sommers and Mark Sterk of Spokane, along with a Democrat from the Olympic Peninsula.

In the past, all landowners had to eliminate septic tanks within a year after public sewers were available. Now, mobile home parks are exempted from that requirement.

The law change was requested by the owner of a Spokane mobile park, who for nine years has refused to use city sewers. Jim Olinger said it would be so costly to tear up streets and lay sewer pipes within the Iron Wheel park in Hangman Valley that he’d be forced to close the park and evict his tenants.

Sterk and Sommers said they supported the change to help the people - often with limited incomes - who live in older trailer parks. Park owners said they’d have to raise rent $100 or more a month to comply with the sewer requirements.

The Spokane legislators noted that no one opposed the change during hearings where park owners and tenants showed up to testify on its behalf. At one point, Spokane officials told Sommers that the city supported the bill.

But city officials later decided the bill needed changes that couldn’t be made “due primarily to the rush to have the bill pass out of (the) Legislature,” Mayor John Talbott wrote last week, in a letter asking for Locke’s veto.

County commissioners said they didn’t know anything about the bill until it landed on Locke’s desk. Otherwise, “we would have done everything in our power to stop it,” Commissioner John Roskelley wrote to Locke’s staff.

“This is a pork bill for a few mobile park owners.”

The Washington State Association of Local Public Health Officials also urged a veto.

“Failure of septic systems is not always readily seen, and tangible evidence (of failure) often means contamination has already occurred,” wrote Carl Osaki, chairman of the association.

Locke signed the bill Friday after a member of his staff told Roskelley the lobbying effort came too late.

County officials say they’ll try for changes next year to require public sewer use if a mobile home park is over a sole-source aquifer. That would put Olinger back on the hook.

, DataTimes