Sniffing Out Plan B
Kevin Taylor
Inlander
When Spokane County Commissioners voted 2-1 last week to spend $254 million over the next 20 years to build a wastewater treatment plant, two things were noteworthy.
They still don’t know when, or even if, the county will get a federal permit to discharge treated wastewater into the Spokane River, which is officially an impaired waterway.
Second, their 11th-hour scramble for Plan Bs foreshadows some of the weighty issues on the agenda of a two-day Spokane River conference that, by coincidence, begins today, Jan. 22.
The conference is all about finding a coherent way to protect the water in a short-ish river (and the aquifer mingling with it) that runs through about a dozen local, state and tribal jurisdictions.
Commission chairwoman Bonnie Mager appears to have driven the Plan Bs by pressing Utilities Director Bruce Rawls and attorney Jim Emacio for details and options for what else could be done with millions of gallons per day of treated wastewater if it can’t go into the river.
The county is in a pickle. Without a treatment plant of its own, the county is sending 8.3 million gallons a day to the city’s plant, which has set a limit of 10 million gallons a day. Estimates suggest the county will hit that mark in four years — and building a plant of its own will take three and a half.
Commissioners Todd Mielke and Mark Richard have said the county may have to shut down all residential construction if there is no place to put wastewater.
Last week they approved some alternatives to the conventional river discharge: piping treated wastewater 17 miles to restore a historic wetland at Saltese Flats south of Liberty Lake; piping it four miles to the Inland Empire Paper mill for industrial reuse; and sending it back to the aquifer through irrigation.
Some criticize the appearance of seat-of-the-pants scrambling when hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars are at stake and none of the Plan Bs have been explored in detail.
“I don’t know for how many years this is just what the Sierra Club was asking the county to look at,” says Rich Eichstaedt, attorney at Center For Justice. “It seems like it would be prudent to get all this information first — is it feasible to do industry re-use? Is it feasible to deal with Saltese Flats?
“It would be disastrous to end up in a situation where there is a plant and they can’t get a (river discharge) permit, and they have no other options,” Eichstaedt says.
Asked if there is a prospect of a lawsuit to challenge the county decision to proceed with the treatment plant, Eichstaedt says, “I think the Sierra Club is looking at all its options to make sure we are going to have a clean river and the taxpayers are getting their money’s worth.”
He praised the county for looking into alternatives to river discharge, and was not alone.
“I think there were a lot of opportunities” for reuse of treated wastewater on that list, says City of Spokane director of wastewater management Dale Arnold.
The option of piping as much as 4 million gallons a day of treated wastewater to Inland Empire Paper was so ad-lib that Rawls admitted to commissioners that he had not even broached it with the company.
“We had talked in generalities a couple of years ago, but I haven’t really heard anything about it since then,” says Wayne Andresen, president and general manager of Inland Empire Paper.
And back then the Cowles-owned paper mill was against the idea. A couple of thorny issues need to be addressed, Andresen says. “It would be difficult for us to give up any water rights. And we would have to be concerned about what are we bringing into our system. Would we have to apply further chemicals or water conditioning?” Andresen asks. IEP is interested in discussing the option, he says.
“Those are perfect questions,” the city’s Arnold says. He sees a future for industrial re-use of treated wastewater, citing the paper mill and the Waste-to-Energy plant as possibilities.
The county’s dilemma, perhaps unintentionally, can be a catalyst for driving industrial re-use and wetlands restoration on a large scale. If industry switches to treated wastewater, more drinking water stays in the aquifer, and the aquifer makes the river fuller, Arnold says.
“We don’t have the time to ho-hum around and wait for answers,” he says, citing population growth projections (especially in Kootenai County) that will add stress to both drinking water and wastewater issues.