At the behest of Inland Empire Paper and the Department of Ecology, the State Senate unanimously passes bill that would delay cleanup of the Spokane River and other state waters.
In a surprisingly easy win for Spokane River polluters, the Washington state Senate voted 48 to 0 Wednesday night to pass Senate Bill 6036, a controversial bill that would appear to seriously weaken state rules governing the cleanup of the Spokane River and other water bodies with serious water pollution problems.
Spokane Senator Lisa Brown is the sole senator who didn’t vote on the bill. Her vote was recorded (see below) as “excused.” Spokane County Democrats had organized an email campaign in advance of the vote to ask that the veteran senator, the Senate’s majority leader, oppose the bill.
“It’s disappointing,” said Center for Justice water lawyer Rick Eichstaedt. “Part of the problem with this is that there has been no dialogue between state
decision-makers and the environmental community state-wide about this measure. And this affects every water body in the state that is covered with a TMDL (a clean up plan required by the federal Clean Water Act). They are using a battle ax when they should be using a scalpel.”
Eichstaedt added that the bill’s passage has stunned a number of the state’s environmental groups that work on clean water issues. The measure was openly pushed by Inland Empire Paper Company, the Cowles-family subsidiary that produces newsprint for the Spokesman-Review and several other publishers. IEP is one of two private companies that discharge pollution into the Spokane River in Washington.
“Certainly one question this raises,” said Eichstaedt, “is whether we want dischargers telling us what the law is even if that means the state faces lawsuits from conservation groups, because that’s really the choice here.”
As for any state dialogue with environmental groups there was some expectation that a meeting with Ecology and the bill’s sponsors would take place before the Senate vote. But that meeting was scheduled for this morning, and when the environmental groups gathered for the meeting today they were bitterly surprised to find out the senate had already passed the controversial bill.
Among those mystified by the events was Nina Bell, a veteran environmental lawyer with Northwest Environmental Advocates based in Portland. Bell had testified against the bill with Eichstaedt last week, and predicted that the bill, if it became law, would put the state at loggerheads with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Typically, Bell noted, a state agency like Ecology would work closely through the regulatory process with EPA on any changes in state water pollution control standards and schedules.
“When something goes wrong in the rule-making process,” Bell noted, “its EPA that gets sued. So they want to play a bigger role up front, in order to avoid problems down the road.”
What puzzles Bell is that Ecology, which supports the bill, appears to be taking a broad and ham-handed approach to dealing with what looks to be a narrow issue involving a single state waterway and a single polluter, IEP, which has had well-documented problems trying to clean up its waste stream to the river.
“Rick [Eichstaedt] is right on when he says that there is a remedy in existing law for extraordinary circumstances, and this remedy is called a variance.”
But rather than seeking a narrow variance to deal with specific process issues at IEP in Spokane, Bell and Eichstaedt note, Ecology is endorsing a sweeping bill that would ostensibly affect all other impaired waterways in Washington.
Bell also criticized the language of the bill which, she said,lacks clarity throughout and uses words like “significantly” and “substantially” to define compliance thresholds that are vague at best.
“Who gets to determine what ‘significantly’ is,” Bell asks, “it’s pretty ambiguous.”
Yesterday’s vote took place amid confusion and it wasn’t just state environmental groups who were stinging from a lack of transparency and consultation. The Spokane Tribe which has complained repeatedly about “dead” stretches of the Spokane River because of low dissolved oxygen caused by phosphorous discharges was also left in the dark.
“As far as I know,” said Spokane tribe attorney Ted Knight, “no one at the tribe or tribal council was contacted. The state has always acted as if it were going to incorporate the tribe’s views in these kinds of decisions. The tribe had hoped it would be consulted prior to any change in water quality standards.”
The legislature’s work on the measure now shifts to the state House of Representatives where Spokane Representatives Timm Ormsby and Alex Wood have co-sponsored, along with Olympia Rep. Sam Hunt, the companion bill.
SSB 6036
Water cleanup planning & implementation
Senate vote on 3rd Reading & Final Passage
3/4/2009
Yeas: 48 Nays: 0 Absent: 0 Excused: 1
Voting Yea: Senators Becker, Benton, Berkey, Brandland, Carrell, Delvin, Eide, Fairley, Franklin, Fraser, Hargrove, Hatfield, Haugen, Hewitt, Hobbs, Holmquist, Honeyford, Jacobsen, Jarrett, Kastama, Kauffman, Keiser, Kilmer, King, Kline, Kohl-Welles, Marr, McAuliffe, McCaslin, McDermott, Morton, Murray, Oemig, Parlette, Pflug, Prentice, Pridemore, Ranker, Regala, Roach, Rockefeller, Schoesler, Sheldon, Shin, Stevens, Swecker, Tom, and Zarelli
Voting Nay:
Absent:
Excused: Senator Brown
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