Cleaning It Up

Sierra Club, working with Center for Justice attorneys, agrees to settlement with City of Spokane that avoids Clean Water Act lawsuit over direct sewage discharges to the Spokane River.

People who use the Spokane River and Latah Creek for swimming, fishing, and other aquatic activities will be better protected under a settlement agreement unanimously approved Monday night by the Spokane City Council.

The agreement was negotiated between city representatives and Center for Justice lawyers working on behalf of Sierra Club. It avoids a lawsuit that would have been brought by Sierra Club against the City under the federal Clean Water Act regarding repeated illegal discharges of raw/untreated sewage to the Spokane River and Latah Creek. The discharges were primarily caused by structural problems with Spokane’s antiquated stormwater management system. The notice to file the federal lawsuit was entered two years ago after a particularly egregious dry weather overflow event that contaminated the river just downstream of the T.J. Meenach Bridge.

“The city should be roundly congratulated for doing the right thing–upgrading its pipes to eliminate raw sewage overflows the the Spokane River,” says Rachael Paschal Osborn, Sierra Club’s Spokane River project coordinator. “The city’s commitment made it possible to settle without going to court.”

“This step will effectively eliminate sewage overflows to the Spokane River during dry weather periods,” Paschal Osborn told the city council Monday night, “and significantly reduce them during wet weather periods.”

As Paschal Osborn explained Monday night, although the settlement is geared toward preventing future illegal discharges of raw sewage during dry weather, the steps covered by the accord should also better protect the river from untreated discharges that occur when wet weather stormwater discharges overwhelm the city’s “combined sewers.” The city has been working since the 1980s to revamp its sewage collection system which still includes hundreds of miles of the so-called “combined sewers.”

The Washington Department of Ecology, which has fined the city for dry weather sewage discharges in the past, set a 2017 timeline for improvements to the city’s combined sewage overflow (CSO) holding facilities. A key to Sierra Club’s decision to settle rather than litigate, said Paschal Osborn, was the city’s agreement to expedite completion of the CSO upgrades well in advance of the 2017 timeline set by Ecology.

“The city knew it was violating the Clean Water Act, but didn’t seem to know how to fix its system system,” said Center for Justice Chief Catalyst Breean Beggs. “The Department of Ecology seemed content to wait for years to require a solution. The Center for Justice hired a waste water engineer, who came up with some affordable solutions, which we were happy to share with the city. To the city’s credit, it agreed to the solutions and avoided hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines and legal fees. Aside from the most important fact that our client likes this agreement, one of the things we like about it is that we’ve contributed to crafting a good solution we can begin implementing right away.”

Under terms of the settlement, the city agrees to make a number of management improvements in the inspection, maintenance, and response to reported overflow events that can lead to raw sewage discharges to the river.

Among the stipulations in the settlement, the city agrees to:

•Enhance public education and public notification of future CSO overflow events to better protect public health and expedite City crew response to overflow events.

•Upgrade eleven combined sewer overflow (CSO) weirs between now and the end of 2010 and evaluate additional modifications based on monitoring data.

•Use closed circuit television and other diagnostic tools to improve the frequency and effectiveness of system maintenance to prevent clogging that can result in river discharges.

•Improve training of City personnel who perform maintenance on the CSO system and modify some maintenance practices.

•Upgrade alarms on CSO facility monitors.

•Increase visual and data inspections of each CSO facility.

In exchange, the Sierra Club agrees not to file suite over any of the allegedly illegal discharges that have occurred to date. However, the Sierra Club is not barred from taking legal action in response to events that occur after the agreement is signed.

The settlement agreement comes four years after Spokesman-Review reporter Karen Dorn Steele authored a startling overview and investigative report on the city’s continuing problems with raw sewage discharges into the river. Based on her review of city reports to the Washington Department of Ecology, Dorn-Steele reported that, despite continuing upgrades to the system, the city continued to discharge millions of gallons of mixed stormwater and raw sewage into both the Spokane River and Latah Creek. The City’s press release on the settlement is available here.

Posted July 14th

Update, 7/16/08 : Read the Spokesman-Review’s editorial on the settlement, “Money well spent.”