Serving Whitman County since 1877
Serving Whitman County since 1877
The City of Palouse has a new, focused directive after a meeting April 5 with representatives of the Department of Ecology (DOE) and town engineers Varela & Associates.
The gathering at city hall was also attended by Mayor Michael Echanove and a committee he appointed to navigate the new permit requirements for the Palouse wastewater treatment plant – regarding effluents discharged into the Palouse River.
Last week’s meeting followed a brainstorming session in February.
Representatives of Varela showed graphics depicting different options for the plant’s discharge – from building a lagoon as in Ritzville – to evaporate it off – to building a tank or to use the effluent for irrigation for non-food crops such as alfalfa.
In the discussions, the DOE representatives concurred with Palouse representatives on a strategy for the stretch of river in question.
“We need to focus on probably not discharging into the river during low-flow periods,” said Echanove. “That’s probably going to turn out to be most cost-effective.”
The new permit for Palouse – which the town is aiming to meet – calls for zero inorganic nitrate discharge, and a two-and-a-half-degrees cooler overall effluence.
This in turn has led to Palouse’s goal: no discharge during low-flow periods.
“That appears to be the solution we can succeed on,” Echanove said. “So you’re not gonna put it in the river in the summer, what are you gonna do with it?”
Palouse’s engineers are working on this now – whether it may be the lagoon, tanks, irrigation or another option.
The section of the Palouse River which runs through the town is on the 303D list, a statewide list of waterways which are not meeting water quality standards.
“They don’t want us to make matters worse,” said Echanove, a skeptic of the particulars of what the DOE seeks. “At the same time, why are we gonna spend millions of dollars on something you can’t detect two miles downstream?”
“You’ve got to meet your standard at your point of discharge,” said Brook Beeler, spokesperson for the DOE. “That’s their piece of the pie they have to meet.”
The next step is to see what the engineers come up with.
“We’re gonna do something. But we’ll wait until the engineer’s numbers come back,” Echanove said.
The town has until December 2017 to designate a plan to meet the new permit.
Because the Palouse plant discharges into the Palouse River, the city has a special permit which is administered through the DOE. Last July, when the permit came up for review, the temperature of the facility’s discharge water was deemed too high.
The DOE thus directed Palouse to reduce the temperature by two-and-a-half degrees as well as cut the nutrient totals from the plant, particularly for nitrogen and phosphate.
The high nutrient levels are a problem because they feed the algae in the river. When algae thrive, it depletes the water’s oxygen.
The city has until 2024 to construct whatever needs to be built.
Last August, Palouse hired Varela & Associates, of Spokane, to begin the process of meeting the permit.
The mayor’s committee, appointed last summer, is led by Bruce Baldwin, chairman, a former mayor, and, as a city councilman in 1994, served on the water and sewer committee when the wastewater treatment plant was built.
Garth Meyer is a former Whitman County Gazette reporter.
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