MALTBY — There’s no way a gourmet soup maker can co-exist with the sewage plant next door, the lawyers for Campbell Soup subsidiary StockPot Inc. argue.
StockPot has filed an appeal of the environmental impact statement that allows King County to go ahead with the proposed Brightwater treatment plant along Highway 9 near Maltby.
The appeal may not change any plans for the plant.
The company is also negotiating with King County on a relocation plan for its 100,000-square-foot facility, which is adjacent to the Brightwater site. King County already has acquired all the other property adjacent to StockPot in the Woodinville North Business Park, according to lawyers for the company.
The appeal is set to go before a hearings officer in early July.
Filed earlier this year, it blasts the environmental study that determined the Highway 9 site is suitable for the Brightwater plant.
"The very idea of a sewage treatment plant surrounding the (StockPot campus) is wholly incompatible with the StockPot culinary image and damaging to its business," said the appeal, written by lawyers at Davis Wright Tremaine in Seattle.
The environmental study failed to consider the economic benefit StockPot provides Snohomish County, with its 375 workers and annual payroll of about $18 million, the appeal said.
The study didn’t propose adequate mitigation plans for the four-year-long construction period at the sewer plant, the appeal claims. The construction is certain to kick up a lot of dust, and StockPot’s facilities are not designed to filter that much "fugitive dust" from the air. There’s also a risk of serious airborne contaminants being stirred up when bulldozers start working on the site of a former auto-wrecking yard.
The noise and vibration from the nearby construction will "severely impact StockPot’s manufacturing and marketing activities," the appeal said, claiming that the environmental study doesn’t adequately account for these issues.
Once Brightwater is built, the plant will give off hydrogen sulfide gas, and that rotten-egg smell will be "incompatible with food preparation" and will likely hurt StockPot’s marketing and development activities.
The environmental study didn’t do enough to account for that, the appeal said.
Trucks hauling sewer sludge to the plant could spill or leak contaminated waste onto the StockPot access road, the appeal said. That potentially could lead to contamination entering StockPot’s parking lots, transported on tires, and into its buildings, on the shoes of workers.
The plant is also likely to attract "rodents and other vermin" to the area, the appeal said.
Christie True, who is in charge of major capital projects for King County, said the county is in talks with the company on a relocation package that would pay to move it to a new location.
She said she believes StockPot won’t be affected by the early stages of construction, which will take place at the south end of the Brightwater site, well away from the soup maker. It won’t be until 2007, she said, that construction will move close to StockPot’s location.
The goal is to have the Brightwater treatment plant operating by the end of 2010, she said.
Herald Writer Bryan Corliss: 425-339-3454 or
Talk to us
> Give us your news tips.
> Send us a letter to the editor.
> More Herald contact information.
