Dave Peeler, 54, is water quality program manager for Washington state’s Department of Ecology. He traveled between Olympia and Spokane throughout 2005 overseeing the Spokane River TMDL Collaboration, a unique effort to brainstorm the best cleanup plan for the river. Environmentalists, government officials and industry representatives worked together to research and discuss ways the river might meet the many needs pressed upon it in this modern age.

The Department of Ecology’s river cleanup plan is expected to be finalized early in this new year. Toward the end of his busy 2005, the day after one of the hours-long meetings of the TMDL Collaboration group, Peeler talked with editorial board member Rebecca Nappi about the unique collaboration and what it means for the future of the Spokane River.

Rebecca Nappi: Describe your job.

Dave Peeler: I’m the manager of the water quality program at the Department of Ecology in Olympia. I supervise over 200 staff across the state who are involved in controlling water pollution and establishing water-quality standards and making sure we meet those standards.

Q: Why are you in Spokane this week?

A: To attend a meeting and to work with my staff in the Spokane office concerning the water quality in the Spokane River. We had a public meeting yesterday as a continuation of a series we started in a collaborative process with wastewater dischargers, municipalities and local environmental groups to examine some of the issues around the Spokane River and our plan to clean it up and some of their ideas on how to get there.

Q: Can you describe, in the simplest way possible, what exactly the TMDL process is.

A: TMDL means Total Daily Maximum Load, which is a mouthful. Really what we’re talking about is how much pollutants can the river take and still meet water quality standards and still be healthy. Still be healthy for humans, still be healthy for fish and wildlife. And so the TMDL study we do is an attempt to look at scientifically, through monitoring and modeling, how much pollution is in the river today and how much we’d have to reduce it in order to have a healthy river that meets water quality standards and protects public health and fish and wildlife.

Q: Can you explain how the Spokane River TMDL collaboration came to be?

A: The collaboration came about as a result of the draft water quality study, and TMDL, that we did starting several years ago. The Spokane River has been on our list of polluted rivers in the state for several years. When a river is on that list, we are required under federal law, under the Clean Water Act, to do a study to determine how much pollution it can safely handle and develop a plan to reduce it down to that level. Our study had been underway for several years and late last year (2004), we released the results of that study with some draft conclusions about how much pollution would have to be released and by whom. And that study got a lot of attention, especially by the local cities and municipal and industrial dischargers here in the Spokane area because, of course, as a result of that they might have to reduce their pollution by orders of magnitude — a lot — and it would cost them a lot of money in a relatively short period of time.

They wanted to insure that we had done the best available study that’s possible, explored all alternatives, for reducing pollution. And they wanted to come up with a more collaborative approach deciding who would reduce how much and when and where. The environmental groups, on the other hand, wanted to push ahead, but they realized that because of the extreme reductions that will be required to have a healthy river that there was a potential for litigation and disagreements that might stretch on for years.

So rather than face that right off the bat, between the state and the local municipalities and the environmental groups, we agreed we’d put together a collaborative process to look at a way to come up with a plan together that would reduce the pollution in the river and that would avoid fights and disagreements that would tie up our hands for years and would help us to clean up the river faster.

Q: Is the collaboration a unique situation?

A: I think it is somewhat unique. The situation in Spokane is unique, in a sense, because of the interstate nature of the river — Idaho and Washington both being involved. There’s an Indian tribe — Spokane Tribe — downstream. We have Avista with dams on the river, which are in both states. And we have the various dischargers up and down the river, as well as nonpoint sources. When you put all that together, that’s a pretty complex mixture. So that’s unique to begin with. And then to have this collaborative process that really didn’t take hold until after we’d done our study is fairly unique as well. And it’s my hope we’ll have a unique outcome. That is, we’ll agree on how to get at this and we’ll have an agreement in place and start making it happen.

Q: Does the Department of Ecology consider itself part of the collaboration or the people the collaborators are appealing to?

A: We’re part of the collaboration. We’re helping to fund the process. We agreed in an exchange of letters about how this collaborative process would be set up. I am actually co-chairing the process along with Todd Mielke from Spokane County.

Q: You were at the meeting, of course, all day yesterday. How did you feel about the tenor in the room?

A: I was actually very pleased with the tenor in the room. It could have been a very tense day. We had asked both the dischargers and environmental community to come up with their scenarios and proposals about how best to clean up the river based on the information that had come out in our collaborative process. Because there is so much at stake her for people. That had the potential to be a tough day for folks — controversial and tense. The reality was people put out their best ideas. They talked about them. They talked about why they had proposed one thing and not another. They answered questions. I thought it was a very helpful session in the sense that it was more informative and not combative.

That’s a testimonial to the collaborative process that we’ve had over the last several months which has allowed people to get to know each other and understand each other’s problems about their activities on the river and some of their concerns about economics, future growth, just technical problems associated with the kind of clean-up plan we’re talking about. And to think seriously how we can have a successful plan that makes everyone successful. And less in the sense of winners and losers. I was really pleased yesterday to see that kind of relationship develop. Unfortunately, we have a ways to go yet. We have to put together a plan and get agreement in the next few months based on the suggestions we heard yesterday.

Q: Let’s talk timetables. What we saw yesterday was the result of how many months and how many meetings?

A: We started meeting with the collaboration group in March 2005. This is November and we’ve been meeting monthly. That’s about 8 or 10 meetings. In addition, we had established several workgroups, subcommittees of that full group, that had been meeting sometimes weekly for short periods of time as they worked on collecting information on specific issues we had assigned them.

For instance, we asked a technical work group to look across the country at what kind of treatment technology are other communities employing to get pollutants, in this case, nutrients, out of their wastewaters. And so we had a cross section of environmental memberships from my agency, from the EPA and from the local dischargers and other groups that worked together to gather that information and present it in a way to the full group so we could all evaluate it and understand what’s going on across the country. And how would that apply here.

That group met pretty frequently for maybe three or four months. And now they are done. They have accomplished their task. So we had four different work groups that were doing similar kinds of work during that time. That helped as well. We had the leaders of these organizations that met monthly. And we had our division people and staff people and engineers and scientists working together to collect the information that we could use.

Q: What is the next step?

A: The next step is for the Department of Ecology, that’s my agency, to take the information that was presented to us yesterday as well as all the other information we gathered and produce what we think would be a framework for an agreement for the longterm plan here and bring that back to this group next month.

Q: Will the TMDL be presented to these groups?

A: The TMDL is out there in a draft status. What we’ve been working on is more the implementation strategy for that TMDL. What we will try to present is our best shot on what that implementation strategy should look like. We’ll present that, not in the sense that it’s a done deal that this is it, we’ve made up our mind, but in the sense that in given all the information we got, and some time to think about them, and pull what we think are the best ideas from those that can fit together and put it all in one place and then start from there.

And if we can reach agreement on that underlying framework next month, then I think what we’ll see then is an effort to produce some memorandum of agreement and agreement among the parties that we’ll actually sign onto within the next two months after that.

When we started this collaborative process, both the environmental groups and the discharger group wanted an outcome in 60 or 90 days. I’ve been involved in various projects across the state for a number of years and at the time I didn’t think it was possible, though it would be a good thing. When we started to meet and outline what kinds of information we would need to gather in order to reach an agreement, it was pretty clear it would take several months. To their credit, everyone said that’s OK, let’s do this job right. Let’s not rush the decision. Let’s get the information we need and come up with the right plan for the Spokane area. We did that. And that helped out a lot.

Now to say that within the next couple of months or so we can reach a final agreement for everything to come next, that’s incredible to me to be able to make that statement.

Q: You said the Spokane River has been on the list of polluted for years. What got it there?

A: Under the federal laws, the Department of Ecology is required to access water qualities statewide, all the information and water-quality data we can gather or that comes to us from other sources — could be counties, could be universities, could be local environmental groups that sample and report water quality. We take all that data periodically and assess it against the state’s water quality standards and determine which water bodies are not meeting water quality standards and place them on this list.

So in the case of the Spokane River what we’re talking about here is for the most part high nutrients entering the river — phosphorous mostly — as well as some other kinds of pollutants from municipal treatment plants, primarily sewage treatment plants, that cause low dissolved oxygen levels. It’s a bit of a complicated mixture in that some of the pollutants can immediately cause low-dissolved oxygen levels in the river and in Lake Spokane. And some of them have an indirect way of doing that.

The nutrients, phosphorous primarily, enable algae blooms — and I’m sure you’ve seen algae blooms down on Lake Spokane in the summertime, they can get pretty bad — well, the algae blooms are a problem, but the algae will die, sink to the bottom of the lake, and then it robs the lake of dissolved oxygen so that there’s not enough oxygen for fish to survive and other animals. So you have kind of a dual whammy there from the nutrients hitting the river.

So we listed it for dissolved oxygen primarily, although there are other pollutants of concern in the Spokane River. But the major issue that we’re dealing with in this cleanup plan is dissolved oxygen. Dissolved oxygen itself is not a pollutant; it’s required to be there. It’s the other pollutants that get in the river that rob the river of dissolved oxygen, meaning it’s not a healthy river.

Q: What exactly is dissolved oxygen and why is it so crucial?

A: We’re sitting in this room now and we’re breathing in oxygen from the air around us. And if we happened to be in a closed room without a source of oxygen in a short period of time we would use up all the oxygen here and we would suffocate. So think about fish in the river. Dissolved oxygen is oxygen is oxygen that’s dissolved in water. They will take oxygen directly out of the water through their gills and that’s how they got oxygen for their bloodstream and to survive. And as that oxygen gets depleted, then they are basically gasping for breath.

In a hot water body in the summertime, a warm lake or something, you can see fish at the surface basically trying to gulp air in, because there’s not enough dissolved oxygen in the water itself. And sometimes if you have a really bad aquarium at home that you haven’t cleaned, you’ll see the same thing. That’s really it in a nutshell. They have to have oxygen to survive in the water column itself, because they are not air-breathing creatures out in the atmosphere like us. So when it gets low, they can actually suffocate and die.

The other thing that can happen, especially for trout and salmon, is they spawn in the gravels at the bottom of our rivers and lakes and the eggs have to mature in those gravels. And generally, when we have low dissolved oxygen levels, it’s even lower in the gravels where those eggs are, so the eggs will frequently die when there is low dissolved oxygen, meaning they can’t reproduce. And so you could have a run of fish that will slowly die out over time because there’s not enough oxygen for the adults and there’s not enough oxygen in the gravels for the eggs.

Q: Lake Spokane is a biggie in this. Explain why Lake Spokane is the harbinger for the entire river.

A: In our studies, we looked at the health of the river all the way from the state line with Idaho all the way to Long Lake Dam at the bottom of Lake Spokane. We did that because we needed to determine where are the problems in the river and where’s the worst problem. When we’re dealing with dissolved oxygen, our plan is if we can deal with where the worst case situation is, we can probably solve any problems in the remainder of the river as well. That’s usually our thesis going into these studies.

When we looked at the Spokane River and Lake Spokane, the worst problem we saw was in Lake Spokane. One reason Lake Spokane is the worst is that it acts as a sink in a way. Where the river is free flowing, or nearly so, in between the dams, the pollutants and the dissolved oxygen can be fairly high, but because the river is moving, they don’t build up in those areas. When you get down to Lake Spokane, you have this slack water behind the dam for many miles and it’s fairly deep at the lower end, so the pollutants can settle out there and build up over time. So what we see is that is where we have the highest levels of phosphorous in the summertime that will cause these high levels of algae and plant buildup, which will then die and rob the lake of oxygen.

Also, the lake will stratify. In our state, and across the country, during the summertime because of temperature differences, lakes will stratify, or separate into different layers — commonly about three layers. One close to the surface. One that’s a middle layer and one that’s a deeper layer at the bottom. It’s those deeper layers that tend to get robbed of dissolved oxygen, sometimes almost completely. Which means that fish and wildlife really can’t survive at those deep layers in the summertime. So what we looked at was where’s the worst problem and when and it turned out to be in those middle and deep layers in Lake Spokane in the summertime.

Q: You worked in Spokane. Talk about your experience and those years.

A: I grew up in Seattle, but I had relatives in Central Washington and my grandparents had a ranch just outside Coeur d’Alene and so I spent a lot of vacations and summers in Eastern Washington and just outside Coeur d’Alene on a ranch so I knew Eastern Washington pretty well. So when I graduated from college at University of Washington — with a degree in zoology and English literature — and when I graduated in 1973 it was in a terrible Boeing recession, it was the time when people had billboards that said “Will the last people leaving Seattle turn out the lights.” It was very hard to get a job in the Seattle area. I found a job working for the Department of Ecology as an entry level technician in the Spokane office in 1975. That was my first job here. I worked with water resources and shorelines programs for eight years here.

Q: Did you interact with the Spokane River when you lived here?

A: I did. In fact my wife and I, our first house that we purchased after we married and moved here, was on the Little Spokane River, north of town, up in the Glenn Eden area, and so we used the county park there frequently, floated the Little Spokane River. And one of our favorite activities in the summertime was to float in the Spokane Valley down the Spokane River and also down through the Bowl and Pitcher which I always thought was one of the most beautiful areas I’d ever seen and I still do until this day.

Q: Let’s go back to the English Literature major. How do you use that degree in your job?

A: One of the things I have found over the years is that my background in English literature has led me to look at people’s writing styles. It’s led me to think about when we’re writing, are we communicating what it is we want to communicate or are we simply giving people information or data that doesn’t tell them what we mean. It’s also easy for people to misunderstand our intentions, especially when we communicate in writing, and we all have examples, especially from e-mails these days, where people don’t think too hard about what they’re typing. And I think my background with English literature allows me to more seriously look at our writing and to make sure we are communicating the right messages of our intentions and not sending messages we don’t intend to send but sometimes you unintentionally use the wrong words and make people upset for the reasons they really shouldn’t be.

Q: Did your degree help you see river as metaphor?

A: Because I have both a technical-biological background and a literature background, I tend to see the river less as a series of sampling events for river quality and more as the river as a whole, as a place that people and animals and fish and wildlife live in and recreate on and use. It’s a lovely river and we need to do our best to keep it that way.

Q: Where do you live now and what rivers are there to interact with.

A: I live in Olympia and I actually live on Puget Sound now. And there is a little river next to our property that enters into Puget Sound. One of the things I do every year is to go down with my little water-quality monitoring kit and test the water quality in that river and I enter that information into a national database of volunteer water monitors. That’s fun for me to be able to do that and compare that water quality over time and see what happening around our state and across the country. There are fish that spawn in that little river. Salmon are spawning in it right now, as a matter of fact, and so it’s always fun to go watch salmon spawning and see smaller fish in the spring as they move out.

Q: What’s the name of that river?

A: It has no name. This is an unnamed creek or river that flows into Puget Sound. Maybe I should name it.

Q: You’ve obviously interacted with a lot of rivers, or read about them, because of your job. How unique is the Spokane River in comparison to other rivers in our country?

A: I said it’s unique in many ways. We have to deal with two states and an Indian tribe and we have the dams on the river. There are rivers across our country that are similar in that nature — major rivers commonly flow through one or more states, there are lots of Indian tribes, lots of dams. But what might be unique here is that we have a river that flows right through the middle of the heart of our cities here. We have downtown Spokane. I visited during Expo ‘74, and I was amazed at having this park-like setting in downtown Spokane with a river flowing through the middle of it that looked pretty clean.

And I think that’s unusual. Most places I’ve visited across the country the major city is not in the middle of the river, it’s down at the mouth of the river where it flows into the ocean or where it flows into the Great Lakes or something like that. And here you have a river that’s really the lifeblood of the Inland Northwest, where the major cities sit right on it. That’s different. That’s not what you ordinarily would see.

Q: What can individuals do to make sure this river stays vital?

A: Individuals have a couple of different roles they can play. They can take individual actions of their own. As we’re talking about reducing pollutants getting into the river, individuals can think about what they are using in their household. And what they can do to lessen their impact on the river. Whether that’s the use of low phosphorous or no phosphorous detergent. Are they washing their car on the driveway so that the pollutants from that car end up in the drains that go into the river? Are they getting their septic tanks pumped when they should, if they are on septic tanks, on a frequent basis and then taking care of any problems that come up? So they have those individual actions they can take.

Then, greater than that, there is going to be a need for collective community action here to clean up and keep clean the Spokane River. And individuals can certainly have an impact on the decisions that are made and what kind of clean-up actions are going to be taken and how soon and what will they cost. So they can participate in the decision-making process at their local community level, whether that’s the city or water district or whatever.

Questions from Colin Mulvany, videographer.

Q: When you said that Lake Spokane is kind of this sink, when you reduce the phosphates upstream, will it really have that much effect on Lake Spokane, because doesn’t it build up over time?

A: Because Lake Spokane does tend to act like a sink, two things happen. Pollutants enter the river, as we’re discharging into the river all the time. And then there’s the things that build up in the sediments in the river and become re-available each year. So that’s actually a question that was raised in our collaborative process. How much of this is from the pollutants that occur during the summertime and we know we can lower those down, but then is there a sink out there in the sediments at the bottom of the river that will become available and could also help to cause a problem to continue long after we reduce the load.

Q: Can you flush the sink, clean the sink, and then refill it up?

A: We can’t really flush the sink that way. It does flush a little bit. In our water quality study, we found that the critical period for reducing the loads is the spring, summer and fall when we have low water flows. In the winter time when you have higher flows, when the rain starts coming and the snow melts, you have high flows and at that point there is a lot of dilution, a lot of movement in the river, and we don’t really see this critical problems with low dissolved oxygen. It’s really toward the spring and summer, as that flow reduces, that we see that. So there is some flushing action during the high-flow periods and not any flushing action during the summer.

One of the things we are looking at is if we can get higher summertime flows in the river than we have currently, though the operation of Avista’s dams on the river, will that help the river? We are modeling that question right now using our models. We think it will help. It’s a question how much difference that will make. Obviously the water coming out of Coeur d’Alene has a certain amount of pollutants. It’s not pristine water. There is a community that lives there. So we’re looking at that issue of flushing and higher flows as well as reduction in pollutants.

Q: For me, in terms of these videos, I listen to what you say and then I try to go out and videotape it. What would you suggest for me in terms of what we call B-roll.

A: If you go out to the Spokane Valley, you can see industrial development right up to the edge of the river in many places, like where the Industrial Park is. There are pipes and outfalls there that you can film. Parts of them are above water. And you can see industrial development right up to the river, meaning pollutants will come into the water there.

You can see the outfall from the Spokane treatment plant. That’s a pretty large quantity of wastewater with its pollutants getting into the river. Unfortunately, because it’s wintertime, you won’t see the algae blooms in Lake Spokane. Those are pretty impressive in the sense how bad they are when they happen in the summertime. You could film down there and say this looks like a tranquil place to live, and it is, but in the summertime when the algae build up…

I drove out to the river a couple of weeks ago and we were looking at the upper part of Lake Spokane and if you drive out there today on the highway that goes out to Tum Tum, you will be able to see some areas with those big macrophytes, those big plants that grow up in the shoreline areas and the pollutants allow those to grow. It’s all part of the same problem.

The nutrients that enter the river from both point and nonpoint sources not only cause algae to grow, but they also encourage large, aquatic plants to grow. We call them macrophytes. They tend to grow in the shallow, shorelines areas in bays. They can also die off in the summertime and sink to the bottom and also help to rob the lake of oxygen. They can also be a safety hazard to boaters and swimmers. The other thing that happens is that lake-front owners don’t want to have that problem, they will sometimes use pesticides in order to reduce those things. Or they hand pull them. But they always come back.

You can get in a cycle — and I don’t know that it’s happening so much at Lake Spokane but it has happened in other lakes — where lake owners use pesticides to knock back plants, the plants grow back, they have to use even more pesticides. This isn’t a healthy condition for the rivers and we don’t encourage people to use large quantities of pesticides in lakes.

Q: Do the macrophytes feed on phosphorous?

A: The macrophytes are encouraged to grow thicker and taller because of the nutrients.

Q: The Spokane sewage treatment plant. What is the problem with them not being able to take the phosphates out of the wastewater?

A: When I lived here back in the ‘70s, that treatment plant was actually being built. It was a state-of-the-art treatment plant when it came on line. It was a secondary sewage treatment plant and it had advanced treatment in that they took some additional care to remove phosphorous during the summertime and they are still doing that. It is a biologically based treatment plant that uses microbes to break down the sewage and remove the pollutants. It can only reach a certain degree of efficiency no matter how well it is operated. It can only remove a limited percentage of the nutrients from the sewage. And that’s typical of the treatment plants, not just of Spokane, but of the communities upstream and on into Idaho.

In order to get down to the lower levels of nutrients that really are necessary to protect the river, they are going to have to add something that is more of a filtration-based approach where they take the wastewater as it comes out of that secondary treatment plant and run it through filtration processes that will remove another 90 to 95 percent of the phosphorous remaining. So it will be much, much cleaner once they install that further treatment. Those treatment processes are expensive, not just to build, but they are somewhat expensive to operate depending on the nature of which one they finally choose to install. And then, of course, they will have more bio-solids taken out the treatment so they’ll have to deal with those bio-solids as well.

Plus, it will take more land available to add more treatment. In the case of the city, the plant is nestled down by the river. Those are real constraints just how much they can do down there. It’s a real problem for them to think about the best solution from a treatment perspective. How can they install it and operate it in a way they can afford and fit down there and really do the job.

Q: The proposed Spokane County treatment plant — is that newer technology and does it become a non-issue with the new technology.

A: The advantage, if a new treatment plant is built by the county out in the Valley, they won’t be adding on to an existing plant. They will probably be building a plant that uses a similar biological process on the front end and then uses this other treatment process on the back end to really reduce the phosphorous. But they’ll be designing that from the get-go, all to be one plant that works together well, and not adding on. It’s like you can add a room onto your house and sometimes it doesn’t quite have the feel it was designed well as a unit. That’s sometimes the problem with treatment plants if they aren’t really designed from the beginning to have the whole level of treatment. It’s much more costly and much more difficult to have them work effectively.

That’s the advantage the county will have once they start. The other thing they’ll have the advantage on is water reuse. Water reuse is going to become more and more a feature of life here in the Spokane area. With these high level of treatment that are possible with new technologies, that water can be re-used and not just put back in the river, along with what other pollution remains with it.

It can be reused for irrigation, for industrial processes. Think about the outdoor watering that people do on their lawns here in the summertime. It gets pretty hot here. And you can use quite a bit of water on your plants and grasses. Golf courses and parks use a lot of water. And that water can be reused effectively. So the county has an advantage as they build that plant they’ll be thinking how to do that, how to pipe and plumb that plant in a way that makes it easier to use that water for reuse and not simply pipe it into the river.