Delisting of lake opposed

Washington Attorney General Christine Gregoire appeared Friday as the state’s top lawyer at a Gonzaga University Law School forum on the future of the troubled Spokane River. But the GU Law School graduate and Democratic candidate for governor also gave several hints as to how she’d approach some of Eastern Washington’s water-quality problems if she’s elected this fall.

Gregoire said she’s personally opposed to the delisting of Coeur d’Alene Lake from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s big regional cleanup of mine wastes from Idaho’s Silver Valley. Some of the metals-tainted mine sediments have spread downstream as far as the Spokane River and Lake Roosevelt. Removing the lake from the Superfund, a goal of Idaho’s politicians, would take a regional consensus and a green light from EPA, which bowed to Idaho interests in 2002 by agreeing in its record of decision for the Coeur d’Alene Basin not to schedule any cleanup activities directly in the lake over the next 30 years if its water quality remains good.

“I don’t see how Lake Coeur d’Alene gets delisted — but that’s the agenda of Idaho,” Gregoire said.

Friday’s forum, called “The Spokane River: Treasured Resource or Industrial Sewer?” attracted more than 100 lawyers, public officials, citizen activists and GU students. They learned about a large number of important decisions affecting the river that will be made this year and in 2005. The issues include:

• Clean Water Act water quality cleanup plans and permits

• The Spokane-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer study.

• Superfund cleanup decisions for the Coeur d’Alene Basin and Spokane River watersheds.

• Relicensing of five Avista hydroelectric facilities along the river.

• Reviews of a proposed new park below Spokane Falls.

Gregoire said she’s also opposed to Idaho’s decision to continue issuing water permits for withdrawals from the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer while a bi-state study is under way to determine how much water remains in the aquifer, the Spokane-Coeur d’Alene area’s sole source of drinking water. The $3.5 million study was launched in December. For the past decade, Washington state has enforced a moratorium on new water withdrawals from the aquifer due to concerns about low flows in the Spokane River.

“I want a friendly relationship with Idaho, but fair is fair,” Gregoire said, noting that the two states are competitors for the aquifer water.

She also criticized the Bush administration for its “quid pro quo” attitude in current negotiations with Canadian polluter Teck Cominco Ltd. over its decades-long practice of discharging millions of tons of slag and heavy metals from the company’s Trail, B.C., smelter into Lake Roosevelt. She said the White House is considering not holding Teck Cominco to U.S. environmental cleanup standards out of fear that Canada will retaliate against American companies for pollution that has gone over the border into Canada. Teck Cominco and the Canadian government have been lobbying against a recently-issued Superfund cleanup order for Lake Roosevelt from EPA’s regional office in Seattle.

“The quid pro quo is we leave each other alone. That’s not the way I feel about it,” Gregoire said.

Asked about recent assurances from Gov. Gary Locke’s staff to Spokane County and Liberty Lake officials that they’ll eventually receive Spokane River discharge permits even though the EPA has said there’s no more capacity for additional sewage in the oxygen-depleted river, Gregoire said she wasn’t aware of those discussions. She said two current Washington Department of Ecology cleanup plans to improve dissolved oxygen and reduce temperatures in the Spokane River, called Total Maximum Daily Loads (TMDLs), should be completed with maximum public involvement. “The TMDL process has to be transparent. I’ll do my best to uphold it,” Gregoire said.

The TMDL for dissolved oxygen is supposed to be finished by mid-2005. Local municipal and industrial dischargers are criticizing the proposed limit, saying it may be too stringent.

Citing her past experiences with complex environmental cleanups, including nuclear waste issues at Hanford, Gregoire called for a collaborative process to address all the river’s problems, which also include PCBs from industrial discharges, mine wastes and the impact of dams on water flow. “We can and we must clean up the Spokane River, while not hindering economic development,” she said.

American Rivers listed the Spokane River this year as the sixth most endangered in the nation, in part because so many important decisions are in the works that will decide its future, said Rob Masonis, the group’s Northwest regional director. Northwest Rivers’ scientific advisory group said the Spokane River is actually in much better shape than many of the nation’s urban rivers, but it faces several “imminent threats” from combined sewer overflows that continue to discharge millions of gallons of raw sewage during storms and snowmelt, heavy metals, PCBs, dams and inadequate flows in summer.

“The Spokane River brings together the challenges facing rivers across the country … you guys have a diamond to play with here,” Masonis said. He urged local officials not to succumb to pressure from industry and municipal dischargers to reduce water quality standards in the river.

A panel with representatives from EPA, the Washington attorney general’s office, the Spokane Indian Tribe and a local attorney for river dischargers discussed the current cleanup challenges facing the river.

Thomas Eaton, director of EPA’s regional operations office in Olympia, said the goal of Congress in the 1972 Clean Water Act was to make all rivers “fishable and swimmable” by 1983 and achieve zero discharges by 1985. That goal has proved elusive. “Obviously, we haven’t obtained those goals, but we continue to work towards them,” Eaton said. Because the Spokane River doesn’t meet water quality standards, the EPA can’t allow further discharges, he said.

“Since the river is already impaired, the dischargers have to reduce their loads,” Eaton said.

Peter Scott, a lawyer with Preston, Gates Ellis’s Spokane office, represents the river’s municipal and industrial dischargers. They are using an EPA-approved process called a Use Attainability Analysis (UAA) to see whether dissolved oxygen standards might be relaxed in Long Lake and other stretches of the river where salmon can’t spawn. They are using an Ecology water model to argue that even if all discharges to the river were eliminated, salmon could never spawn in Long Lake (also known as Lake Spokane) because of the influence of Avista’s dam.

“Even with no human activity, you’d still have water quality standard violations in Long Lake…it makes no sense to establish unmeetable standards,” Scott said.

The dischargers will have a “heavy burden” to convince state and federal regulators to lower the river’s water quality standards with the Use Attainability Analysis, said Assistant Attorney General Ron Lavigne. “No single UAA has gone through successfully in Washington. If this one does, it will be the first,” Lavigne said.

The Spokane Indian Tribe is a separate nation that is also empowered to set its own water quality standards, said tribal attorney Shannon Work. Tribal officials have set more stringent water quality standards in their stretch of the Spokane River because many Spokanes subsist on a heavy diet of fish, he said. The tribe will intervene in the UAA process to challenge any lowering of the dissolved oxygen standards, he added.

“We will be a player along the river to protect our people,” Work said.