GUEST OPINION: Don’t let river plan be too little, too late

Our Spokane River is sick – it suffers from heavy metals from the Coeur d’Alene mining district, PCBs and other toxic chemicals, too many dams, excessive algae blooms, inadequate streamflow and critically low levels of dissolved oxygen. For those who care about the river, we have our work cut out for us.

After nearly a decade of work, the Washington Department of Ecology this week released the second draft of a water quality cleanup plan (also known as a TMDL) that is intended to reduce algae blooms and improve dissolved oxygen levels. The goal is to substantially reduce the amounts of phosphorus, ammonia and other oxygen-consuming pollutants that are discharged by sewage plants and industries.

Unfortunately, the cleanup plan is flawed and will fail to achieve Clean Water Act requirements. Even more unfortunate, both the state Department of Ecology and the federal Environmental Protection Agency are aware of the shortcomings but still unwilling to address the problems. Instead, the agencies assure the public that “things will get better” and that “we will evaluate progress in 10 years to see how the cleanup is going.”

Why is the cleanup plan not adequate? Part of the problem is found in the nature of the pollution. Scientists have concluded that even very small amounts of phosphorus cause algae blooms in Lake Spokane and degrade water quality farther downstream, including on the Spokane Indian Reservation. That means that phosphorus must be reduced to minute concentrations.

Locally, however, there is resistance to making the investments needed to reduce phosphorus to the proper levels. Some say that 5 percent one way or the other doesn’t make a difference. This is untrue. In the Spokane River, small inputs of pollution can hurt water quality. This problem must be accounted for up front, before public officials make expensive decisions about treatment technology that might not work.

A second issue is timing. The cleanup plan calls for a check-in after 10 years, but enforceable standards will not be imposed until 2027, 20 years from now. This lengthy timeline is virtually unprecedented. The Spokane River deserves to be cleaned up now – within the next five years – to benefit the current generation of people who use and enjoy the river and are paying for cleanup every month on their utility bills.

Finally, we must get a handle on the problem of flow. Up until Monday, when Avista began its annual “spill” of water out of Lake Coeur d’Alene, the Spokane River hardly had any water in it. Low water flows contribute to dissolved oxygen problems. Low water also looks bad, smells bad and is extremely unhealthy for fish and other aquatic life.

Why is the river so low? In a nutshell, we overuse water on our lawns and in our households. Water conservation is essential to river cleanup, but gets short shrift in the cleanup plan. The plan contains no provisions to improve the amount of water flowing in the river.

The dissolved oxygen plan has been nine long years in the making. Local governments and industries are poised to spend hundreds of millions of dollars to upgrade their wastewater treatment systems. The Spokane River cleanup plan must be scientifically and legally credible in order to serve as a foundation for the large public investments that our community will make over the next several years. It also must work – we cannot afford to lose our river.