Getting to “No.”

Commissioner Bonnie Mager forced Spokane County to finally deal with some harsh realities about its wastewater treatment plan. But it wasn’t enough to get her vote for the CH2M Hill contract.

On paper, at least, Tuesday’s vote went like this: Spokane County Commissioners Todd Mielke and Mark Richard voted for moving ahead with the $254 million (or so) contract with CH2M Hill Constructors, Inc. and signed the contract. Commissioner Bonnie Mager voted against it.

But that’s not the whole story; probably not even half.

The story, really, is that Mager moved a large rock that for years hadn’t moved an inch. The rock, so to speak, is the position the county and its utilities director, Bruce Rawls, have embraced for the past five years that there really isn’t anything much amiss with their plan. That plan was, and is, to build a large sewage treatment plant that will discharge wastewater to a waterway (the Spokane River) that is listed as “impaired” under terms of the federal Clean Water Act. Notwithstanding the indications that you can’t do that, the county has been proceeding as if it could.

Tuesday’s vote may well have been the last best chance (short of a legal injunction) to at least frame a contingency plan.

Under the resolution adopted Tuesday, the Board of Commissioners has now conditioned its approval of the CH2M Hill contract, with an agreement to pursue “three discharge alternatives”: aquifer recharge, industrial reclamation, and a plan that would divert the treated wastewater not to the river, but to a wetlands restoration project in Saltese Flats in eastern Spokane County.

Mager wound up voting against the resolution because, she said, she wanted the resolution to be even more proactive in developing contingency plans. Specifically, she said she was holding out for language that would more explicitly have the county open negotiations with the City of Spokane on a fourth option (temporarily discharging treated county wastewater into the city’s sewer system) if it learned that one of the three options in today’s resolution was not viable.

“I’ve seen far too many times where we’ve rushed forward as a community only to find we didn’t thoroughly research the consequences and then wound up shooting ourselves in the foot,” Mager said, explaining why she voted not to sign the CH2M Hill contract.

And yet it’s also true there would have been no resolution to begin exploring alternatives to discharging wastewater to the river were it not for the work Mager had done with the board’s attorney, Jim Emacio, and Rawls in the week preceding the meeting.

In a river cleanup process that has already been plagued by numerous missteps (scientists being silenced or resigning in protest, a federal agency apologizing for interpreting the law incorrectly) Tuesday’s meeting was characteristically bizarre.

Rawls’s presentation was innocuously penciled in for the board’s 9:30 CEO briefing. Ostensibly, it was to answer a handful of questions that Mager had posed to Emacio about the project, which Emacio had forwarded to Rawls. But the meeting offered much more than that.

To begin with, Rawls himself brought up the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision, made public Monday, that the high court would not be hearing an appeal in a Clean Water Act case with facts that clearly apply to the Spokane River. In short, the Supreme Court is letting stand a Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals decision finding that EPA wrongly issued a permit to the Carlota Copper Company for a discharge into an “impaired” waterway in Arizona. Rawls explained what he thought the Carlota case meant for the county–that because no TMDL (Total Maximum Daily Load) allocation had been completed for the Spokane River, “until the TMDL is done, we will not get a permit” for the new wastewater treatment plant.

“I’m pretty optimistic that when the [Spokane River] TMDL is approved, we can get a permit,’ Rawls told the board as he was answering Mager’s written questions. “The question is, when is that going to occur? And the concern that I think Commissioner Mager has is if the TMDL is not completed when the [new] plant is done, what are we going to do?”

And with that, Rawls went from briefing the commissioners to making his recommendation that the county simultaneously pursue the three options cited above. Mager said she agreed with his reasoning for selecting the three options he recommended and that she supported the three options.

So did Commissioner Mark Richard.

“I think what you’re attempting to do is provide the community and provide this board with alternatives to the ultimate question, if we don’t get the TMDL authorized, what have we done to provide for the future of our community?” said Richard. “And you have set the stage, really, for three viable alternatives to buy us anywhere from between two million gallons per day to twelve million gallons per day solutions [sic] that can buy us additional time if we need it.”

Commissioner Todd Mielke who, just weeks ago, said he was willing to bank his career on a vote to proceed with the CH2M Hill contract, tried to gracefully amend his position by drafting on to Mager’s concern.

“I think your question is,” Mielke said, “if we go forward on the plant, and for some reason there’s a hiccup with regard to the TMDL and discharging into the river is compromised, are we going to be…

“Ready,” Mager interjected.

“In my perspective,” Mielke continued, “a large part of the answer is, it depends when you initiate those other alternatives, because if we wait two years before we start on Saltese or start on industrial reclamation, and we know it’s a two year process, then we’re already setting ourselves up for a one or two year gap from the time the plant will be done and the time [it can operate].

“Oh absolutely,” Mager said. “And that’s why I asked the questions of Bruce [Rawls], because I certainly can’t get there and go forward with signing the contract if we don’t have some type of viable alternative that we have some confidence that we can implement should we not get the TMDL and the permit because the TMDL isn’t finished. That to me would be reckless.”

Mager then turned to Rawls and asked him how confident he was that, in pursuing the alternatives, there wouldn’t still be a gap between when the plant was finished and when it could actually operate.

“Well, I can’t give you a very good answer,” Rawls replied. “I graduated from college thirty six years ago almost. And when I came to Spokane County, in my wildest imagination I never thought I would spend twenty five percent of my career on a treatment plant project and still not have it finished. I’ve been at this now for over nine years.”

“I’m recommending to the board that we proceed because I think it’s the right decision,” he continued. “But I’m also telling the board there are risks, but I can’t quantify the risks.

“If I thought there was even a fifty-fifty prospect that we couldn’t use this plant, I don’t think I’d be making a recommendation on it. But I can’t tell you any more than that. And to some extent this issue is going to come down to whether all of the folks in our community want to improve the Spokane River and the Rathdrum Prairie aquifer and other things. And there will be people out there who can make a decision over the next three or four years who can take actions or not take actions that would be beneficial towards our environment by getting this plant built and permitted and operating. But I can’t predict how those actions might play out. I just can’t. But I’ve had that conversation with certain individuals that say ultimately you may have a decision to make whether this plant operates and we benefit the environment or not.”

“That’s exactly what I was going to say,” Commissioner Richard quickly added. “And those are the elements that are out of your control. And I think what we’ve seen is ninety-five percent of the community seems to be on board with the direction we’re going. The question is whether the other five percent when they have an opportunity that’s important to them will leave the process, could throw wrenches into each and every one of these alternatives, could postpone, delay, create moratoriums that are out of our control. But for us to standstill because of that unknown is also reckless and irresponsible in my opinion.”

Rawls’s and Richard’s comments reflect some of the underlying tension in the debate over the county’s proposed plant. Much of that stress is because the county has, through its own decision-making process, put the regulatory fate of the plant at risk by not pursuing treatment technology or methods that would be designed to meet the TMDL discharge requirements for phosphorous, the key pollutant of concern for the Spokane River.

Rawls, in his briefing, staunchly defended the county’s selection of MBR (membrane bioreactor technology), a method that many of the county’s critics contend is not the best technology available for treating phosphorus.

“I think a lot of people debate as to what the best filtration technology is,” Rawls said. “Frankly, I think we have some of the best experts in the nation working for us. They have literally hundreds of years of experience on water reclamation and I think they’ve given us the best advice there is with regard to the technology for filtration, which is membrane filtration, that we picked. I believe no matter if it’s a brown water disposal method, or a wetlands restoration or urban irrigation, or discharge to the river, that we are going to have to filter the water. And in order to do reclaimed water in this state, with class A water, it has to be coagulated, filtered and disinfected. And all of the experts tell me–and we’ve had a number of workshops on this subject since 2004 with literally dozens of people attending and everybody has affirmed that membrane’s are the most effective and cost-effective technology that’s out there. If I thought this treatment plant didn’t provide the foundation for any of the alternatives that seems feasible and probable in the future, I don’t think I’d be recommending to the board to build this plant. I don’t think there’s a lot of risk that we would build a different kind of plant, than a membrane plant, in the future.”

CFJ attorney Bonne Beavers, who participated in at least one of the workshops Rawls referred to and has worked with the EPA regional office in evaluating treatment technologies for phosphorus, takes issue with Rawls on MBR.

“MBR is an effective technology for removing many pollutants and nutrients, including endocrine disrupters,” says Beavers. “But Mr. Rawls overreaches when he says it is one of the most ‘effective’ and ‘cost effective’ technologies for our purposes. It is effective for nitrogen removal, which is why it has been chosen for discharge in marine waters. It is not particularly effective for phosphorus, which is our pollutant of concern. Moreover, it is one of the most expensive technologies in terms of capital costs and operating and maintenance costs.”

In his presentation Tuesday, Rawls made another assertion that baffled Beavers. The County Utilities Director said he was very optimistic that, under a new TMDL for the Spokane River, the county would be allowed to discharge higher than background phosphorous levels to the river because it could offset those discharges by eliminating septic tanks over the aquifer.

“We have a very robust analysis,” Rawls said. “That has already been reviewed and approved by Ecology based on septic tank elimination that will provide about eight times the number of offset credits that we need.”

Beavers, who supervises the Center’s public records research on the wastewater project says she has no idea what Rawls is referring to.

“This is news to us,” Beavers said, adding: “Under the Clean Water Act, a new plant such as the county’s has to meet standards for phosphorus in its discharge – there is no provision for offsets for a new plant. Additionally, state law requires the county to demonstrate these before it can discharge to the river. The only analysis we are aware of was one commissioned by the county which the county’s own consultants studying human caused phosphorus pollution in ground water deemed unreliable because it contained no data to support its conclusions. Similarly, Ecology’s TMDL lead at the time, Drea Traeumer, also raised concerns about the study.”

In short, if Beavers is right, then Rawls’s optimism about quickly getting the TMDL and a wastewater permit for discharging phosphorous to the Spokane River may be misplaced.

Certainly another noteworthy part of Rawls’s presentation today was his hope that the Inland Empire Paper Company (also a river discharger) would be the industrial consumer of treated wastewater from the county’s plant. Rawls acknowledged that IEP had been cold to the idea in previous discussions but that it might reconsider given some of the newly discussed considerations and formulas surrounding a new TMDL.

But even if IEP has changed its position on using recycled wastewater as process water for its plant, Rawls wondered aloud about changes in journalism and signs of a shift away from newspapers. Later, he tried to assure the commissioners that a four mile long pipeline built to service IEP (it if were built) would likely cost less than $10 million and also be capable of serving other users (Plante’s Ferry Park, Spokane Industrial Park, the County Fairgrounds) in that area.