Olympia
Nina Bell said she knew that many considered Gov. Jay Inslee a dedicated environmentalist, so it was a surprise when he and his administration denied a request earlier this year to place regulations on nutrient pollutants that municipal wastewater plants discharge into Puget Sound.
“I thought he would be more pro-active, but I think it’s actually unusual when a governor wants to take a strong position on something that is environmental,” said Bell, who is executive director of the nonprofit group, Northwest Environmental Advocates. “They seem to be more focused on the economic situation.
“On climate change, that’s his signature issue and it’s tremendously important, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a million other things that need to be taken care of,” Bell added, listing the water quality of Puget Sound as among the top priorities.
Jessie Payne, an Inslee spokesperson, said the governor “fully recognizes the Puget Sound as an iconic foundation of our environment and our economy. Minimizing human impacts to the Sound is a high priority, and the (Northwest Environmental Advocates) rule-making petition is just one of many ways to tackle excess nutrients.
“The region is growing rapidly and many of the necessary infrastructure investments – like upgrading municipal wastewater treatment facilities – take time and resources, often along with a large price tag to local communities,” she said.
Payne said the state Department of Ecology “has been taking immediate actions to cap excess nutrients while also working with individual facilities on longer-term investments, and we continue to learn from the lessons of long-standing efforts like those in Chesapeake Bay, Long Island Sound and San Francisco Bay.”
The dispute between Portland-based Northwest Environmental Advocates and Inslee’s state Department of Ecology now is being waged in Thurston County Superior Court. Judge James Dixon has scheduled a hearing for Jan. 31, 2020, for the lawsuit filed by the environmental group.
1945 law cited
The controversy focuses on a section of state law that requires Ecology to apply a concept, known by its acronym AKART, to municipal sewage treatment permits. AKART stands for “all known available and reasonable treatment.” The law has been in effect since 1945, when Washington state declared its policy to maintain “the highest possible standards” to protect state waters for public enjoyment, wildlife, and industrial development.
Charging that the state is in violation of AKART, Northwest Environmental Advocates filed a petition in 2018 asking Ecology to update its 32-year-old discharge standards for sewage treatment that the group said are based on decades-old technology.
The petition asked Ecology to require municipal sewage treatment plants to use technology known as tertiary treatment to remove nutrient pollutants from treated sewage that flows into Puget Sound. An exception would be if the state could show the plants would suffer severe economic hardship.
Nutrients are chemicals that plants such as algae and other marine and aquatic plants need to grow. These nutrients are required to maintain healthy ecosystems, but when there are too many nutrients it can throw ecosystems out of balance, causing environmental degradation. That is commonly referred to as “nutrient loading.”
When too many nutrients enter surface waters, algae are able to reproduce quickly and in large amounts, overwhelming the ecosystem. As these algae die, the chemical reactions that occur as part of their decomposition remove oxygen from the water, significantly killing or driving away fish and other organisms, and reducing overall water quality.
The state currently defines AKART as secondary treatment of waste, which typically involves primary treatment to remove most solids, a biological treatment step that uses aeration, a second step to remove excess microorganisms for solids treatment, and disinfection, according to an Ecology publication. Tertiary treatment involves a third treatment process, often chemical addition and filtration, to remove nitrogen and phosphorus pollutants.
Seeking limits
By mandating tertiary treatment, Northwest Environmental Advocates said the state could set limits on the discharge of nitrogen and phosphorus into Puget Sound and its tributaries. Currently, there are no federal effluent limitations on nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorus and the use of advanced treatment technologies for nutrient control is limited within Puget Sound and its tributaries, said Vince McGowan, Ecology’s Water Quality Permit Manager, in a recent interview. Effluent is liquid waste, for example, from sewage treatment plants and industrial sites.
The environmental group used Ecology’s own statements over several years to argue its case, including a 2006 public notice about a study of low dissolved oxygen levels in South Puget Sound. The document stated that “fish need oxygen,” “nitrogen is the main pollutant that causes low dissolved oxygen levels,” and the source of nitrogen pollution to Puget Sound included sewage treatment plants.
Northwest Environmental Advocates also cited Inslee twice in the petition, noting that he oversees the Washington Shellfish initiative to “promote critical clean-water commerce.” The project has advocated for reducing nutrient loading and harmful algal blooms in Puget Sound.
Inslee in 2018 signed an executive order directing state agencies to take “several immediate actions to benefit southern resident killer whales.” A task force report said federal regulations for many sewage treatment plants allow discharges of toxic contaminants that can impact Southern Resident orcas and their prey.
“It can be very expensive to clean up or provide stormwater and wastewater treatment at these ‘end of pipe’ locations. A more cost-effective approach is to prevent contaminants from coming into these systems in the first place,” according to the task force report released last year.
There also were nine references to climate change in the petition that Northwest Environmental Advocates submitted.
The environmental group quoted an Ecology statement that its Puget Sound Nutrient Reduction Project that began in 2017 was intended to “improve Puget Sound’s water quality by reducing human sources of nutrients, and make it more resilient to negative effects from climate change and Washington’s increasing population pressures over the next several decades.”
In January, Maia Bellon, director of the state Department of Ecology, denied the petition from Northwest Environmental Advocates. She said the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency was doing a study on nutrients and wastewater treatment plants, “in part because enhanced treatment for nutrient removal is neither affordable nor necessary for all wastewater treatment plants.” In a recent interview, Ecology officials cited a 2011 study that said it would cost up to $2 billion and possibly more.
Ballon said Ecology believes that a water-quality based approach is necessary because it would set effluent limits at levels to “ensure that a discharger does not cause or contribute to a violation of water quality standards.”
“Ecology agrees that portions of Puget Sound are impaired by nutrient pollution,” Bellon, whom Inslee appointed in 2013 as the department’s director, wrote in a letter to Bell. “We are actively leading efforts to reduce nutrient loading to Puget Sound, both in our permitting and non-point practices, and through public forums.”
Bellon referred to non-point pollution — the type that flows into Puget Sound and its tributaries from several sources such as agriculture, rainfall or snowmelt. Pollution from a precise spot, such as the pipe at a sewage treatment plant, is referred to as a point source.
Suing the state
Nearly a month after Bellon rejected the petition, Northwest Environmental Advocates sued the state, asking a Thurston County Superior Court judge to overturn Ecology’s decision. The attorney general’s office, which represents Ecology, has rejected the group’s accusation that the agency is violating the AKART law, the 74-year-old mandate that the state require the use of “all known, available, and reasonable treatment technology” in discharge standards for municpal wastewater treatment plants.
Northwest Environmental Advocates also appealed to Inslee to overturn Ecology’s decision. The governor in March affirmed Ecology’s conclusion.
“Within five years, Ecology expects to have capped the nutrient levels discharged from municipal treatment facilities, while also concurrently moving some facilities to advanced treatment programs that will reduce overall nutrient levels discharged into Puget Sound,” Inslee wrote.
The governor said the long-term goal is to have “advanced treatment” at municipal sewage treatment plants “where necessary to meet water quality standards.”
Dave Peeler, a former Water Quality Manager at Ecology who volunteers for several environmental groups including Northwest Environmental Advocates, said Washington has made significant progress since the 1980s in combating threats to Puget Sound’s water quality. With the state’s large population growth, however, Peeler said he’s worried about the department’s current approach to nutrient pollution because it may not result in requirements for wastewater treatment plants to address the problem.
Bell said Inslee’s Department of Ecology is enmeshed in the “study-it-to-death phenomenon, where they just will never have enough information or analysis and so they believe they can simply continue to postpone doing anything to pollution until some later date.
“After a while, a culture of an agency and a pattern of its behavior demonstrates that they simply don’t want to pull the trigger; they don’t want to comply with state or federal law to control pollution at its source to protect Puget Sound,” she said.
This story was originally published June 28, 2019 3:26 PM.
