Getting a handle on lake impacts

Cities in the Flathead are easy targets in setting pollution limits

By RICHARD HANNERS / Whitefish Pilot

Protecting water quality in Flathead Lake is a well-supported goal, but with all the growth and development taking place upstream across the Flathead Valley, achieving that goal will become increasingly difficult.

An acronym for that goal is TMDL — total maximum daily load, the maximum amount of a pollutant that can enter a lake or river before water quality is deemed unfit for its designated use. Uses include human or livestock consumption, agricultural use, habitat for fish and recreational.

Once a TMDL is set for Flathead Lake, upstream communities will have to conform to it. The pie can't grow even if the population does, and the slice of the pie offered for cities and towns in the Flathead is pretty thin.

Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ), which is developing a TMDL for the Flathead area, will hold a public meeting on the subject on Sept. 4 from 9:30 a.m. to noon at the Hampton Inn in Kalispell.

The meeting will summarize work completed to date, present proposed projects and discuss a strategy. All interested stakeholders are encouraged to attend.

Statewide process

The TMDL process stems from the 1972 federal clean water act. States were authorized to develop their own water quality standards in 1987, and states developed a list of impaired waters called a 303(d) list.

For TMDLs, thresholds must be established for both point-source pollutants — what comes out of a pipe, such as from a city sewer treatment plant — and nonpoint sources, which include forest, agricultural, atmospheric and rural residential sources.

Because of a 1997 lawsuit brought by five environmental groups, Montana is under a strict guideline to move forward with the TMDL process. U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy ordered the state to complete the work for all watersheds on a 1996 list that needed TMDLs by 2007.

The Montana Legislature pushed the deadline back to 2012, and the state has established 91 watershed-planning areas covering the state.

Several have been completed, said George Mathieus, chief of the DEQ's water quality planning bureau, including the Lake Helena watershed, which resembles the Flathead Valley in complexity, with forestry, mining, municipal and stormwater impacts.

One big change is the Environmental Protection Agency's push for "numeric" rather than "narrative" standards, Mathieus said. Instead of saying "free from harm," the EPA is looking for a number, which isn't easy to find when tackling large watersheds.

A plan for the Flathead

The DEQ's 2001 "Flathead Nutrient Management Plan and TMDL for Flathead Lake" report called for reducing man-caused nitrogen and phosphorus loads by 15 percent, with an additional 10 percent buffer, for a total reduction of 25 percent. Since then, however, the population of the Flathead Valley has increased by about 25 percent.

The 2001 plan said the greatest threats to the lake were urban and agricultural land-uses upstream from Flathead Lake, including growth in the unincorporated areas.

But some progress was reported — Evergreen was served with a municipal sewer system, phosphorus detergents were banned, and best-management practices became more commonplace in the timber industry.

According to the plan, 68 percent of phosphorus loading came from forest lands, 19 percent through precipitation and 6 percent from agricultural and urban areas. The percentages for nitrogen were similar — 83 percent from forest lands, 6 percent through precipitation and 6 percent from agricultural and urban areas.

The Flathead's seven permitted municipal point sources accounted for 1 to 2 percent of the total nutrient loading to Flathead Lake, the plan stated.

But DEQ noted that the Flathead's treatment plants were operating at less than 69 percent of design capacity. If allowed to operate at their permitted discharge limits, nitrogen and phosphorus loads could increase by 4.6 and 7.8 times, respectively.

Focus on the cities

Whitefish public works director John Wilson has expressed some concerns about how TMDLs will affect municipal sewage treatment plants.

Wilson represents Whitefish on the Montana League of Cities and Towns' water quality committee, which meets quarterly with DEQ. The league has also retained HDR Engineering to provide technical assistance and educational information.

"The challenge is to limit the total amount of nutrients discharged to state waters and to implement effective reductions for all point and non-point sources throughout the Flathead basin," Wilson said. "Our meetings with DEQ are helping us understand each others' goals and concerns."

The state already has a certain level of control over permitted point-sources, such as municipal wastewater treatment plants, he said, but there's no operating permit program for most non-point sources, such as septic systems or forestry and agricultural practices.

If the state should rely on existing permit programs and place disproportionate limits on wastewater treatment plants, Wilson said, city residents could, in a worst-case scenario, spend millions of dollars to meet more stringent requirements with very little overall benefit to Flathead Lake.

"What we need is a comprehensive plan that considers solutions for point sources and nonpoint sources, alike," he said.

Kalispell, Whitefish, Columbia Falls and Bigfork have invested tens of millions of dollars to meet existing permit requirements and are already removing most nutrients that flow into those plants before they can reach rivers and streams, he said.

"We've picked the low hanging fruit," Wilson said, "but it is extremely expensive to remove ever smaller concentrations of remaining nutrients. In fact, the state is considering limits that can't be achieved with existing technology, so it's hard to predict an eventual cost."

In the big picture, it could be more practical and achievable to seek basin-wide benefits through a "nutrient trading" program, he said. Such a program could enable overall nutrient reductions by giving credits to municipal wastewater treatment plants for off-site improvements.

For example, municipalities could upgrade their wastewater plants to remove nutrients to practical levels and then satisfy any remaining requirements by constructing wastewater collection systems to replace existing septic tanks or paying for improvements to help foresters or agricultural operators reduce nutrient originating from their activities.

Current long-range plans call for Whitefish upgrading its treatment plant in 2015, Wilson said, but DEQ could ask Whitefish to give up its lagoons and go to a more expensive mechanical system.

The lagoons are better able to handle large volumes during storms and spring runoff, Wilson said, but if the state imposes stricter nitrogen requirements, the city might be forced to go to a mechanical system.

"Our staff accepts their responsibility to maintain and operate the wastewater plant as effectively as possible and protect water quality in the Whitefish River and downstream to Flathead Lake," Wilson said. "Frequent laboratory testing shows they meet all permit requirements, with a wide margin of safety, month after month and year after year. New technology will allow them to achieve even better results."

A cooperative effort

Mathieus says growth and development across the state have changed the relative contributions from point and nonpoint sources, but he agrees that municipal sources tend to be smaller proportionally than nonpoint sources.

He says the approach DEQ will probably take for the Flathead is "to bite off one chunk at a time," rather than take on the whole TMDL process. Over the next year and a half to two years, documents will come out on TMDLs based on nutrients, sediments and temperature.

While DEQ is ultimately responsible for producing the EPA-approved document, the data will come from a host of public agencies, including the Flathead Lake Biological Station, Flathead Basin Commission, Forest Service and citizen watchdog groups like the Haskill Basin Watershed Council.

"We need to tap into local expertise," Mathieus said.

Mathieus thinks the idea of "nutrient trading" makes sense, but he doesn't like the word "trading" and doesn't want to see money exchanged for the right to pollute, like the carbon-trading system used to address global warming.

He also notes there is a misconception that TMDLs drive regulation. While it's true that waste-load allocations in a TMDL will be used in permits — which are not required by nonpoint sources — the TMDL program is voluntary and has no regulatory teeth.

"But people are getting more and more involved, and grants are available," he said. "I'd like to see more point and nonpoint people get together to deal with a watershed area."