New Mead school can’t get sewer service

The Mead School District’s new Mountainside Middle School can’t have county sewer service because of the state Growth Management Act – even though the Colbert-area school will be next to a large suburban enclave.

Spokane County commissioners could find no way Tuesday to accommodate school officials’ last-ditch effort to obtain sewer service before they have to start building a $1.9 million sewage treatment plant.

“It would have been extremely helpful,” Mead School District facilities and planning director John Dormaier said.

Failure to obtain a sewer connection is “a significant disappointment to us,” Dormaier said. “It’s the preferred and ideal solution to wastewater treatment.”

County and school district officials had agreed on a June 1 deadline for a decision, and the answer was no. But Dormaier said school officials still have “a little bit of wiggle room” and wanted to see whether county officials also do.

They don’t.

County Commissioners Bonnie Mager and Todd Mielke agreed with their staff Tuesday that sewer construction couldn’t be completed in time for the school’s September 2008 opening even if extending a line were legally and financially feasible.

Commissioner Mark Richard was absent.

The $33.1 million, 650-student middle school is to be at 4717 E. Day-Mt. Spokane Road, near the road’s intersection with U.S. Highway 2. It will be on the same 80-acre site as Colbert Elementary School, which faces Greenbluff Road.

The land is just north of a suburban neighborhood classified as a “limited development area.” The designation recognizes that the area was developed before the Growth Management Act took effect but doesn’t allow full urban development.

Also “grandfathered” is the septic tank and drain field that Colbert Elementary will continue to use.

County Utilities Director Bruce Rawls said in an interview that the middle school’s onsite wastewater plant will treat sewage nearly as well as the $106 million regional plant the county plans to build. But Dormaier noted the school district will have to hire a licensed operator and pay for maintenance that may become increasingly expensive.

The Growth Management Act generally allows extension of urban services to rural areas only to protect public safety and health as well as the environment, and when the services are “financially supportable at rural densities and do not permit urban development.”

Commissioners might make a case for protecting groundwater, as they did earlier this year when they persuaded Spokane city officials to provide sewer service to the county’s new water park at 61st and Freya. But the sewer line was already in the street next to the water park, which was adjacent to an urban growth area.

Serving Mountainside Middle School would require construction of a line across two miles of rural land, from a point about a half-mile west of the intersection of Little Spokane Drive and Shady Slope Road.

The county could refuse to serve property owners in the rural area, but the mere presence of the line would create demand for hookups, Rawls said. That’s why courts have ruled against such extensions, according to the commissioners’ attorney, Chief Civil Deputy Prosecutor Jim Emacio.

About the only way to avoid an adverse court decision would be to extend a line so small it could serve only the school, Emacio advised – something he didn’t think “anybody in his right mind” would do.

Indeed not, Rawls said: “That would be a poor investment of public money.”

Even though the school district offered to contribute the $1.9 million it has budgeted for a treatment plant, extending a sewer line would cost $4 million to $5 million, depending on the method used to cross the Little Spokane River, according to Kevin Cooke, the county’s sewer planning and design manager.

Serving the suburban area near the school would allow the county to recover its costs in a reasonable time, Rawls said.

County officials have designated the area for a study that could lead to an urban growth designation, but that could take several years.

Still, sewer service could arrive before the school district amortizes the cost of its treatment plant. And county policy ordinarily requires property owners to hook up when sewers become available.

“We have deviations where it just doesn’t make sense to force somebody to abandon a system and hook onto ours, but it’s rare,” Rawls said.

It would be another question for county commissioners.