With an important Spokane River cleanup plan under legal attack by Idaho dischargers, the Spokane Riverkeeper weighs in.

In an effort to ensure that a key plan to protect the health of the Spokane River delivers on that promise, the Spokane Riverkeeper has asked to intervene in a federal lawsuit filed earlier this year.
Riverkeeper Attorney Rick Eichstaedt
“We are intervening as defendants on the side of EPA (the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency),” says Center for Justice lawyer and Riverkeeper attorney Rick Eichstaedt. “I’m not saying we’re entirely happy with the TMDL. But I am saying we need to be at the table.”

The case involves a so-called TMDL (the acronym stands for “Total Maximum Daily Load”) which is a primary tool for enforcing the federal Clean Water Act (CWA). In this case, the TMDL plan at issue is required to address low dissolved oxygen (DO) levels in the river (and Lake Spokane in particular) that pose a clear threat to fish and other river creatures. (Indeed, toxic algae blooms in Lake Spokane even pose a health threat to humans and dogs who come in contact with the blooms.) While other pollutants (heavy metals, PCBs) pose major threats to Spokane River water quality, the efforts to address low DO go back thirty years and are clearly tangled in local, state, and interstate politics.
The latest legal salvo in the battle to see who gets to put what in the river came in July when two Idaho dischargers, the Hayden Area Regional Sewer Board and the City of Post Falls, filed suit in the Federal District Court of Idaho to try to prevent the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from enforcing the latest iteration of the dissolved oxygen TMDL.
Eichstaedt says he’s baffled by many of the 300 or so allegations that the Idaho dischargers have made, including an assertion that the TMDL has to go through an extended federal rule-making process even though, to Eichstaedt, “it’s pretty clear the TMDL is not a rule.”
In whole, Eichstaedt sees the Idaho dischargers’ suit as a broad attack on the TMDL process for enforcing the federal Clean Water Act. So even though the Riverkeeper is not entirely supportive of the DO TMDL, the Riverkeeper does believe that the TMDL process itself has to be defended as an instrument of enforcing the Clean Water Act.
“The most important part of why we’re intervening,” Eichstaedt says, “is that sometimes in these kind of cases the resolution is not in the courtroom. It’s in the smoky back room, and the smoky back room has materialized. Next Friday there is a meeting in Seattle to attempt to negotiate a solution between the Idaho dischargers and EPA. I heard about it and what I was basically told is that if you want a get a seat at the table, you have to intervene.”
Part of what concerns Eichstaedt is that at least one recent proposal to resolve the impasse looks to have the markings of a plan that EPA introduced two years ago and then, under pressure from the Center for Justice, had to withdraw the scheme and make a public apology.