Editorial: Legislation could have aided state’s new clean water rule

By The Herald Editorial Board

“Fish-consumption rate” is the dry, technical term for something very important to state residents. Two things, actually: clean water and fish that’s safe enough to include regularly on our tables.

After a years-long process, the state Department of Ecology has adopted clean water rules that will set standards for a long list of specific chemicals and pollutants and other water-quality issues for marine and fresh water, the Associated Press reported Monday. The rules use an overall federal standard that holds that state waters have to be clean enough to swim in and eat fish from.

Previously, that fish-consumption rate was minuscule, just 6.5 grams a day, or less than 2 ounces a week. The new standard is a much-more-realistic 175 grams daily, about a 6-ounce serving. It’s the same rate that Oregon adopted in 2011, with the approval of the EPA. Using that rate of fish consumption, pollutants can’t result in a cancer rate of more than 1 in 1 million, a stronger standard than the 1 in 100,000 that the state earlier proposed.

With the state’s rules in place, Washington will now wait for the federal Environmental Protection Agency’s review of its clean water rule, 60 days for an all-clear and 90 days for a disapproval of all or part of it. Last year, the EPA released its own draft rule for water quality standards that would have been implemented if the state had been unable to complete the process. It could still enforce its own standards if it finds the state’s rule lacking.

Maia Bellon, the Department of Ecology director, believes the rule is strong enough to meet EPA approval, and that it’s the federal agency’s preference for a state-led process. But even with the stiffer cancer-rate standard, some environmentalists and the state’s American Indian tribes, whose members’ diet and culture relies more heavily on fish and seafood, prefer the EPA’s draft rule to the state’s.

Cities and businesses have held, however, that the EPA’s draft rule would set standards that couldn’t currently be met affordably or with existing technology to filter out the pollutants discharged from factories, industrial facilities, wastewater treatment plants and stormwater systems.

Even the state’s new rules are certain to involve new costs for local governments and businesses, and it’s why the Legislature should reconsider legislation that the Senate gutted in the 2015 session, weakening it to the point that Gov. Jay Inslee, who proposed the legislation, said he wouldn’t sign it.

Using the logic that it’s easier and cheaper to prevent pollutants from entering waterways than to remove them, Inslee’s toxics cleanup plan would have identified the most dangerous chemicals, tracked them to their source and developed “chemical action plans” to find alternatives or methods for limiting the pollutants.

But a Senate committee amended the legislation to remove the Department of Ecology’s power to ban specific chemicals and even limit the toxic substances that the agency could have studied.

The legislation, which was reintroduced this year but not advanced, would have been a useful tool in facilitating the state’s new clean-water standards and in making the case to the EPA that the state’s own rule should stand.