No federal response to tribe’s challenge

A week after the Coeur d’Alene Tribe challenged other governments to come up with some money to monitor the health of Lake Coeur d’Alene, U.S. Rep. Butch Otter, R-Idaho, said he sees no federal funding on the horizon.

A week ago, Coeur d’Alene Tribal Chairman Ernie Stensgar pledged $5 million in tribal money to get a cleanup and monitoring plan for Lake Coeur d’Alene off the ground. He challenged federal and state governments to pony up a matching amount. The tribe is worried, officials said, that any plan to keep an eye on toxic heavy metals lining the lakebed will wither for lack of funding.

No funds are coming from Washington, D.C., this year, Otter said Tuesday. “We are way too late in the appropriation process,” he said. “I appreciate Ernie’s enthusiasm and commitment.”

Otter and other members of the Idaho Congressional delegation last Friday announced the appropriation of $15 million to clean up mining and milling pollution upstream from Lake Coeur d’Alene as part of the 30-year Superfund cleanup of lead, zinc, cadmium and other heavy metals left by more than a century of mining in the Silver Valley.

On Tuesday, the congressman said that with limited money, it makes more sense to deal with upstream pollution before funding a management plan to monitor the heavy metals that coat the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene to the tune of an estimated 70 million to 77 million tons.

Taking a longer view, Otter said, “It comes down to priorities: Where will you do the best with the money you have?” Otter said he would vote to use scarce federal water quality dollars to help small towns deal with strict new arsenic standards in drinking water rather than keeping an eye on heavy metals at the bottom of Lake Coeur d’Alene.

But U.S. Sen. Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, met with tribal officials last week and said he agrees it is urgent to find funding to monitor water quality in the lake. Current opinion among scientists holds that the heavy metals slathered across the lakebed pose little threat as long as the lake water remains clear and low in nutrients.

Local governments and business interests – fearing the stigma of a Superfund cleanup would cripple the area’s tourist industry – worked out an agreement two years ago that the lake could be removed from Superfund oversight as long as a separate lake management plan was in place.

State environmental regulators and the tribe have worked to craft a multilateral Lake Management Plan during the past two years, but recently parted ways when the state said it would be willing to have a plan adopted even if it were not funded. The tribe says an unfunded plan has no teeth and would be a sham if the lake were “de-listed” from Superfund just on the strength of a fat binder on a shelf somewhere.

But it is unlikely the lake will slip away from federal pollution-control oversight even if there is an unfunded lake management plan, a supervisor with the Environmental Protection Agency said Monday.

“We have been clear with the state and the tribe, we will only consider de-listing when there is a plan in place, and when it is more than a plan on a shelf,” Cami Grandinetti, EPA unit manager for the Coeur d’Alene Basin Cleanup said. The estimated “70 million tons of contaminants in the lake don’t appear to be causing a problem right now but they need to stay where they are at. And they need to figure out a non-Superfund solution to the metals problem.”

The lake management plan cannot be funded with Superfund monies since the EPA won’t be doing the work. The agency agreed two years ago Lake Coeur d’Alene could be removed from the 30-year Superfund cleanup of the Coeur d’Alene River Basin. But this has created the dilemma, as Crapo said last week, of coming up with a separate funding source to provide the millions needed to monitor the lake and to identify potential sources of water quality degradation such as sewage and septic discharges and fertilizer runoff.