Long History of Sewage Problems in City of Snohomish

Puget Soundkeeper Alliance sues the City of Snohomish

After suing, group says City on track to fixing sewage problem

At a time when the city’s sewage plant was racking up Clean Water Act violations for dumping too much raw sewage into the Snohomish River, the Puget Soundkeeper Alliance felt it had no choice but to sue the City.

Almost eight years after the environmental group and the City settled under provisions of the federal Clean Water Act, Soundkeeper executive director Chris Wilke said last week the city has made strides to clean up its act.  “It looks good,” Wilke said. “It looks like they’re on track.”  The city has been updating Puget Soundkeeper throughout the process.

The health of the Snohomish River affects the health of Puget Sound, which is declining. Puget Soundkeeper has made the health of the Puget Sound its top priority and in recent years began suing a number of cities and private companies for dumping raw sewage or untreated storm water directly into the Sound or its tributaries, such as the Snohomish River.

The City of Snohomish was one of those sued in the early 2000s.  One of the City’s biggest problems with its sewage plant is controlling the amount of nitrogen that enters the river, especially during summer months.  Too much nitrogen in the river during summer months when water levels are lower chokes the oxygen supply coho salmon need to survive.  The health of the Sound is measured by the health of the marine life that live there.  The quality of the Snohomish River is one small, but important part of the larger health issues of the Sound.

According to a Puget Soundkeeper 2007 paper on the Sound, the health of the Sound’s marine population is “troubling.”  Forty-three species, including orcas, salmon, groundfish and marine birds, are either at risk, threatened or endangered with extinction.

To address its nitrogen problem, the City is working on hiring a company that builds “hotels for bacteria” that will be placed in the City’s lagoon and provides a caged place for sewage-eating bugs to eat up the nitrogen and other contaminants before it enters the river.   The technology called “integrated media” is used in a dozen other Cities, but has never been fully implemented in this state.

The City’s long-term plan, however, is to get out of the sewage business altogether.  It is working on building a $40 million, five-mile wastewater pipeline to Everett’s sewage plant.  Once the pipeline is built, the city of Snohomish will no longer have to worry about keeping up with regulatory standards for treating sewage.

The City secured an agreement with the state Department of Ecology to potentially extend the deadline of building the pipeline from 2016 to 2020 as long as the integrated media project helps the sewage plant meet compliance standards until then, among other stipulations.  In this state, Ecology is responsible for enforcing the federal Clean Water Act.  City officials hail the agreement as a way to save rate payers from higher rate hikes.  The deadline extension lets the city draw out the rate increases over more time.

The wastewater rate is expected to climb 11 percent each year for the next three years.  The extension will allow the city to increase rates 3.8 percent from 2014 onward.  Before the extension, it was set to increase the rate 11 percent from 2014 to 2016.

The City has limited avenues to pay for the $40 million pipeline.  They include grants, loans, bonds and rate increases.  The city is trying to keep rates as low as possible by finding other funding.  With so many other state projects seeking the same money, the field is tight.

Almost a decade ago, the base monthly rate for sewer was $33.05. In 2011, it is proposed to be $56.70 per month.

Sewage is expensive business
The City built its current sewage plant in 1996. When the plant was built, City officials believed it would last 20 years. The City is still paying off the cost to build the plant.

In 1999, Ecology released a water quality study and found there was not enough oxygen in the Snohomish River, which harms fish and the overall health of Puget Sound.  The study found the City’s plant was responsible and determined the plant was in violation of Clean Water laws.
The Snohomish River, with its salmon, is “one of the most important for recovery of Puget Sound,” Puget Soundkeeper’s Wilke said.

After the study, the plant began racking up violations, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.  The P-I reported Snohomish had 102 violations between 1999 and early 2002.

The next hit for the City’s plant was in 2001 when permitting requirements for sewage plants were updated.  These rules are updated every five years.  When the City’s sewage permit was up for renewal, it was found in violation and shortly thereafter Puget Soundkeeper sued.

Soundkeeper must sue
The Puget Soundkeeper Alliance does the work Ecology is too understaffed to do effectively:  enforce the laws that are supposed to keep the region’s public waterways healthy.  Under the Federal Clean Water Act, citizens can sue individual corporations and municipalities for polluting waterways.

According to the P-I’s 2002 series on the health of the Puget Sound, four Ecology employees were in charge of monitoring 900 private and public entities in the entire Puget Sound basin.

Since filing its first lawsuit in 1992, Puget Soundkeeper has settled with the cities of Bremerton and North Bend, and the towns of LaConner and Friday Harbor. The group has filed more than 100 lawsuits overall.  “We’ve been told by representatives of Ecology we are in a sense helping them do their job,” Wilke said last week.  Ecology faces “significant capacity challenges” to enforce an entire state, Wilke said.  “I’m not going to suggest they’re willfully letting (enforcement) slide, but they have not been able to keep up,” he said.

In 2002, Puget Soundkeeper sued Snohomish in federal court for illegal discharges of ammonia, copper, chlorine, fecal coliform and sewage into the Snohomish River.  The City had “no technical defense” to respond, City Manager Larry Bauman said.  The City, Bauman said, was in violation of the law.

Bauman joined the City a month after the city was sued and has led the effort to address the problem. The City settled with the group in 2003 and agreed to a federal consent decree to reduce its pollution. Since then, the decree has been extended to 2013 to comply with federal rules.
Would the City have cleaned up things without the lawsuit?  “I don’t think so,” Wilke said.

Improvements
The City has worked on fixing its sewage problem as best it can. The consent decree required four items: that the City upgrade its treatment of sewage, that the City separate and build bigger sewer and storm water pipelines (heavy rains send overflows of sewage directly into the Snohomish River), that the City improve its sewage lift stations and update its sewage treatment master plan.

“We’ve made a lot of progress,” public works director Tim Heydon said last week.  One example of that progress is the “hotel for bacteria” that will bring the plant into compliance by 2013. The city hopes to install the technology by the end of 2012.  “We have every reason to believe (that) will work,” Bauman said.

Between now and 2012, Ecology will update its compliance standards once again as part of its five-year schedule.  City officials do not know what changes are coming for the 2011 update, but they are not worried.   “We’ve been told there are no significant changes for next year,” Bauman said.

The state operates with a “very narrow window” on giving cities lead time to upgrade their plants to meet new permit standards, he said. It’s part of the problem as cities are given short time lines to meet new regulations.  To meet new regulations, it requires big, costly infrastructure projects.
The city is also well underway on separating its sewer and storm water pipes as part of its four steps to meeting the consent decree.  Laying the replacement pipelines is why the west end of Second Street is torn apart and closed on weekdays.  Heavy rains cause an overflow of sewage to travel in these pipes and go directly into the river. When the project is completed in 2011 the number of times that will happen will be reduced.

The City was able to get grant money to largely pay for the $6.4 million separation project.

Also, the City has fiddled with its bacteria levels to try to maximize the sewage plant’s effectiveness. Weather has a large impact on how effective bacteria at the sewage plant can eat up sewage before it goes into the river.

The most difficult time for the City is in the summer when most of its violations occur.  During summer months, the bacteria are less effective and create a problem called “nitrite lock.”  A buildup of nitrite interferes with and stifles the bacteria’s ability to effectively eat sewage.

Between 2004 and 2009, the City’s sewage plant received 115 violations from Ecology.  The year 2006 was particularly problematic:  the City had more than 70 violations that year.  Heydon was unsure why 2006 was so bad, but speculated the weather may have been a factor.  City engineer Steve Schuller, who came to the City after 2006, concurred with Heydon’s speculation.  That year the City put in a new diffuser at the plant, and violations have since dropped dramatically.  The City has had five violations this year so far, Schuller said.

Mayor Karen Guzak said the city is working as fast as it can to get into compliance. The complexity of negotiating a major project takes time.  “I don’t think there’s a way we could do this faster,” Guzak said.

Before the lawsuit
Before the city built a sewage plant, the City sent raw sewage directly into the river.  When the City built a sewer plant in 1958, it was hailed as a major milestone.   The City built upon that plant in 1996 thinking it would last 20 years.

Between 1958 and 1996, the City performed minor repairs to the plant but nothing major until it built a new plant in 1996.

Snohomish was aware its plant was out of compliance in 1999, but it appears there was no plan in place to rectify that until the lawsuit and federal consent decree forced Snohomish’s hand.  Councilman Dean Randall was on the council in 1999. At that time, the council was told things would be worked out with Ecology.  “(City officials) were confident everything would be ironed out and we would be in compliance,” Randall said.

Bauman arrived in May 2002.  At that time, there was no plan to upgrade the sewer plant, Bauman said.
“There didn’t seem to be an active concept” to upgrade it, he said.  The City needed to have the terms of the consent decree set before it could fully tackle improving the plant, Bauman said.

Snohomish updated its sewer master plan shortly after the decree was settled. It completed the plan in May 2005.

Funding
Snohomish is a small town of about 3,500 rate payers. Funding a multimillion dollar infrastructure project is difficult to spread across rate payers.

The City has a limited number of avenues to fund the project:  It can try to get state and federal grants, it can raise utility taxes and it can go for bonds.  Bonds would need to be paid by the city with additional low interest.  The current plan is to issue bonds worth $1.2 million and $21 million in 2013 and 2016 respectively.

The City also plans to take out low-interest loans of up to $15 million for the wastewater line.  The City has diligently sought state and federal grants to reduce the cost for rate payers, but the City ran into roadblocks.  The cost to fix the problem escalated.  The original plan in 2005 was to build a new plant for an early estimated cost of $10 million.  Since then, the cost rose to more than $40 million.  “The cost of getting into compliance really started escalating and I would say out of control,” Randall said.

At the same time, the cost of building a pipeline to Everett was reduced.  When the costs became almost equal, the City Council switched plans in 2009 to build a pipeline to Everett.  So far the City secured $450,000 in a federal Environmental Protection Agency grant and plans to apply for $5 million next year from Ecology.   It also secured $5.1 million from the state’s Public Works Trust Fund, but legislators locked up that money from being disbursed last year as a way to close the hemorrhaging state budget.

Lobbying efforts
Legislators have been receptive to Snohomish’s funding requests, but there are numerous projects around the state in need of funding.  “They basically say, get in line — there’s a lot of people who want money,” Randall said.

City Council members have traveled to Olympia to lobby state lawmakers for funding.  They also are lobbying to remove a cap of $5 million for projects like Snohomish’s, Guzak said.  “Whether we can get that, I don’t know,” Guzak said.  The cap affects Snohomish’s funding plans for the wastewater line to Everett. The strategy right now is for Snohomish to apply for $5 million in grant funding next September.

“Whenever we see an elected official, we put a bug in their ear,” Councilman Tom Hamilton said.

City officials believe the recent agreement with Ecology places Snohomish in a stronger position for grant requests.  It narrowly missed on funding in 2007. A state bill in 2009 to give more funding to regional projects like Snohomish’s was killed late in the legislative session.