Joint Meetings To Rework Incinerator Study

Thu., May 13, 1999

By Karen Dorn Steele karend@spokesman.com

City and state officials have agreed to meet weekly to revise a controversial study of Spokane’s trash plant rejected by the state last November.

“Our goal is to get a health-risk assessment that’s acceptable to the Washington Department of Ecology,” said Lloyd Brewer of the city’s environmental programs office.

The city of Spokane has set aside $100,000 for new work on the incinerator study.

The new Technical Oversight Committee is made up of two city officials, an Ecology representative from Spokane and the state’s senior toxicologist in Olympia.

The toxicologist, Dr. Harriett Ammann of the Washington Department of Health, reviewed the study for Ecology last year.

In her November 1998 report, Ammann said the $300,000 study by city consultant Kathryn Kelly didn’t meet scientific standards for environmental risk assessments and didn’t answer basic questions about the trash plant’s potential risks to people and wildlife in a 30-mile radius of Spokane.

Kelly’s study, submitted in May 1998, concluded the plant poses little health threat to Spokane residents.

Christine Gregoire, former Ecology director and now the state attorney general, insisted on the incinerator study in 1989 as a condition of a $60 million state grant to help build Spokane’s waste to energy plant and close the county’s leaking landfills.

Gregoire said the study was necessary to address concerns about the plant’s environmental and public health risks.

Representatives from two Spokane environmental groups, the Washington Environmental Council and the Northwest Environmental Education Foundation, have been asked for comments regarding the study revisions, Ecology spokeswoman Jani Gilbert said.

The committee will meet Tuesdays at 1:30 p.m., starting next Tuesday at the Waste to Energy plant on the West Plains.

“The best way to get this resolved is to do it as quickly as we can,” Brewer said.

MONEY HELD The state has refused to reimburse Spokane the $300,000 already spent on the incinerator study until it’s completed correctly this year.

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