A Publisher’s New Problem
Published on June 8, 2008
New documents uncovered by a Center for Justice records request highlight a big problem for Cowles Co.’s newsprint subsidiary and its discharges to the Spokane River.
Spokesman-Review publisher and Cowles Company president Stacey Cowles got directly involved in discussions with state officials this spring after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency rejected a state agency’s proposed new permit that would have lengthened the water quality compliance schedule for a key Cowles Co. subsidiary, Inland Empire Paper.
IEP provides newsprint for the newspaper. It is located in the Spokane Valley and is one of two private companies in Washington that have regulated discharges to the Spokane River.
The newly unearthed documents were provided last week to the newspaper, and are reported on in Sunday’s edition of the Spokesman-Review in a front page story entitled, “Paper plant says it can’t meet accelerated river cleanup goal.” The emails behind the story are also posted on the newspaper’s website. To read the emails, click here ecology-emails.
The internal exchanges raise new questions about whether Cowles sought special treatment from Ecology by contacting the Governor’s office almost as soon as he was briefed on the issue by IEP management in late March. Although Ecology moved to correct its error in the draft permit, the agency also delayed issuing a new version of a river cleanup plan while senior state officials talked with Cowles and paper company representatives to try to solve the sticky regulatory problem.
“We are scheduled to talk internally on Thursday morning,” Ecology’s Eastern Regional Office director Grant Pfeifer wrote to Ecology Director Jay Manning in a March 31st email. “But a decision sooner than that may help ease their [Cowles and IEP's] anxiety–further: Wed (sic) is an Ed Board [editorial board] meeting with the Spokesman-Review–we could get asked (expect to) about river plans and schedules. Should we slow down the TMDL [the dissolved oxygen regulatory cleaup plan] and get this worked out? Dave [Peeler, Ecology's water quality program manager] & my recommendation.”
The email chain records that, after being briefed by IEP officials on March 28th, S-R publisher Stacey Cowles called Laurie Dolan, an assistant to Governor Chris Gregoire, at home on Sunday morning, March 30th, to appeal for help from the Governor.
The crisis bloomed late last year when the U.S. Environmental Protection reported it would not approve the draft permit Ecology had negotiated with IEP because its twenty year compliance schedule was double that required under the federal Clean Water Act for an impaired waterway. The Spokane River is currently out of compliance for levels of dissolved oxygen, a problem due, in most part, to the discharge of phosphorus to the river by the private plants and municipal sewage treatment plants.
According to the documents, IEP’s compliance problems are exacerbated by technical problems it has encountered with pollution control methods used to try to drastically reduce its waste water phosphorous discharges to the Spokane River. In a March 14th email to Ecology Director Jay Manning and other Ecology officials, Peeler reported:
“Jay, for your information IEP had been depending on new treatment technology and internal recycling of a large portion of their wastewater to enable them to meet their new permit requirements. Unfortunately, their scaled up pilot treatment plant is performing poorly due to clogging and they have not been able to make it work consistently and at higher flows, and the percentage of recycled water they can successfully use it not as high as earlier hoped. They are not interested in NPS [non-point source] trades or other ‘delta elimination plans’– they want to be independent and not worry about liability if reductions aren’t achieved by others. Although we had hoped to get them to consider other alternatives, they don’t appear to be willing to do so.”
According to the newspaper’s story this morning (June 8th) IEP has indicated it is willing to sue Ecology and/or EPA if it cannot get the permit changes that it is seeking.
Posted June 8th