Defeated so far in his efforts to pass legislation and write revised water quality standards, Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday is expected to try again with a new rule that would restore state regulatory control asserted by the EPA.
How clean should the state’s waters be?
Answering that simple question has taken years of wrangling by state and federal officials. Gov. Jay Inslee on Thursday is expected to propose new state water-quality standards, in an effort to take back regulatory authority asserted by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to get the job done.
EPA stepped in to write the rules after legislation Inslee proposed last January as part of a regulatory package went nowhere. Inslee pulled the proposed regulations that were supposed to be part of the package, and the EPA stepped in.
EPA issued its own rule last month, but prefers the state act on its own, said Dan Opalski, director of the office of water and watersheds at EPA’s Region 10 office in Seattle. “We welcome the state’s continued work and will pause as necessary to look at what they might bring forward.”
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Issuance of a new draft rule will restart a process of consideration and public comment expected to stretch well into next year. The state’s rule will be reviewed by EPA for approval.
The standards are based on theoretical risk assessments cranked out by computer models, which, on the base of assumptions including how much fish someone eats from local waters and how much water they drink, generates levels of permissible pollutants in the water, from arsenic to mercury.
Inslee has been bedeviled by criticism from tribes that he backslides if he enacts a standard any less strict than neighboring Oregon. He already by federal law is not allowed to set a standard lower than presently on the books in Washington.
The rule is contentious because it is potentially expensive to industries that pollute state waters. It sets a regulatory baseline for water quality that has far reaching consequences, including how much fish people can safely eat from state waters.
One of the goals is to update the standard now on the books that assumes people eat no more than a bite of fish per day from local waters. That’s an amount widely acknowledged as unrealistic, especially in the Northwest where tribes with treaty rights to fish, among others, eat far more.
“It’s the size of a pillbox,” said Kat Brigham, secretary of the Board of Trustees for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon, which led the way for modernized standards. Tribes want to see a unified standard in the Northwest, where fish know no boundaries.
Washington’s proposed new standards probably will follow the EPA’s lead, setting the amount of chemicals allowed to be discharged into state waters low enough that people would face a one in 1 million risk of getting cancer if they ate 175 grams of fish per day. That’s the Oregon standard, and at about a 6 ounce filet, is still a compromise, Brigham said. “It’s not just tribes but many people who eat more than that.”
Businesses meanwhile are wary of uncertainty and cost.
“We continue to support a standard that protects human health and the environment, while at the same time allowing for the growth of our business and the state’s economy as a whole,” Stephanie Miller, spokeswoman for Boeing, wrote in an email.
The goal is a rule that is reasonable and effective, policy directors for Inslee say. Writing a rule that sets levels lower than detectable, or lower than background levels of naturally occurring chemicals such as arsenic, is not helpful, notes Rob Duff, the governor’s senior policy adviser for natural resources and the environment.
Nor is regulating through water-quality standards levels of pollutants such a mercury that primarily make their way to state waters from mining, and by air pollution from coal-fired power plants, Duff said.
“We are trying to bring some sanity to this to get real reductions that you won’t see if you just rely on (discharge) permits.”
Duff said the governor is not planning to run another bill in the legislature as part of his strategy this time around. Specifics are still being worked out, but the goal is to look beyond the box of a theoretical risk of cancer from eating fish to the broader breadth of exposure to toxins. People face a 1-in-3 risk of cancer today from all sources, so it pays to look beyond just eating fish, Duff said.
“If we don’t think about these things differently we may come up with a rule that is not achievable and is frankly blind to the reality of where these things are coming from.”
There also is a question of fairness to dischargers with no control over where some chemicals are coming from, said Kelly Susewind, who is leading the drafting of the rule at the state Department of Ecology.
“What is achievable, and controllable by the dischargers?” Susewind said. “You have to look at the equation as a whole, if you go maximum stringency with all these parameters I don’t think you get something achievable.”
Christie True, director of King County’s Department of Natural Resources and Parks, said what matters is not only the numbers in the standard, but how the rules are implemented — and looking beyond discharge pipes to solve the pollution problem.
“Let’s try to get at the source of these toxics,” True said. “If you try to solve this at the end of the pipe it’s going to be the most difficult and expensive way.”