Thousands of pages of draft technical documents that will be included in the final environmental report for the Brightwater sewage treatment plant are available for review in the Snohomish County Administration Building.
The reports address some of the comments that have been made by the public and Snohomish County since the draft environmental report was released in November. They also reflect a few of the changes that have been made to the plan since then.
The documents are not a complete draft of the final report, but could become a part of it. More Brightwater documents are expected to arrive in Snohomish County on Wednesday.
King County plans to build a $1.3 billion sewage treatment plant in Snohomish County that will be operating by 2010.
The preferred site is along Highway 9 just north of Highway 522, near the Stock Pot Soup plant. The alternative is the former Unocal site in Edmonds. The plant would serve residents in both counties.
Residents near both sites have raised protests.
King County delivered the documents to Snohomish County late Monday as part of the peer-review process.
"Snohomish County is seeing them so we can get their reaction and get the final report done," said Gary Larson, a spokesman for King County’s Wastewater Treatment Division.
The final environmental impact statement is still scheduled for release in November. The final site will be announced after that.
Steve Dickson, Snohomish County’s assistant to the director of public works, is coordinating the county’s technical review of Brightwater. He hopes the new documents will reflect some changes from November’s report, which was criticized by many, including Snohomish County, as being incomplete.
"We hope, in looking at these documents, to find that King County has been listening to the verbal comments the public and Snohomish County have made," Dickson said. "We’re hoping to see that they’ve been diligent in addressing those issues."
Dickson said that because the county just received the documents, it’s too soon to know what’s in them.
"It’s an awful lot of information there," he said.
Only a few items in the new draft are noted as changes from the draft environmental report on the Highway 9 site.
They include decentralizing the odor-control system, which means that rather than trying to control odor in one place, the conveyance system will treat it in various parts of the process.
Another major change is the direction the wastewater will flow: It will now flow from south to north. The arrangement allows for a shorter pipeline coming into the plant, "and would improve public perception of the treatment plant by having the treated ("clean") water at the northern, more public end of the site," the report states.
Also, the Stock Pot Culinary Campus property was not included as part of the treatment plant property in the earlier report. The new layout assumes that Stock Pot would move and that the land could be used for treatment plant buildings.
Many other changes could be included, but not specifically noted as changes, Dickson said. There are a few things Snohomish County officials will be looking for, though.
"It’s fair to say we have ongoing questions about groundwater and surface water," Dickson said.
The report addresses streams and the Cross Valley Sole Source Aquifer, which lies beneath the proposed site on Highway 9. The aquifer provides water to more than 14,000 people in the area, including residents, businesses and schools.
"Contamination would pose a significant hazard to public heath," the report states.
But the proposed site is outside the well head protection area — in the discharge area — which means water under the plant would be moving out of, rather than into, the aquifer.
Reporter Victor Balta:
425-339-3455 or
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