Mill wastewater permit challenged.

Byline: Tim Christie The Register-Guard

A group of environmental organizations has asked the state Department of Environmental Quality to reconsider its granting of a permit that allows a pulp and paper mill to pour its treated wastewater into Yaquina Bay at Newport.

The groups say the discharge permit that DEQ approved for the Georgia-Pacific mill in Toledo, seven miles east of Newport, does not adequately protect public health or the ocean environment.

They want the DEQ to reopen the permit and require Georgia-Pacific to undertake more stringent monitoring of the wastewater; limit bacteria, turbidity and color of the wastewater; study the marine system around the outfall, and take other steps to minimize the amount of discharge.

The petition was filed by the Northwest Environmental Defense Center, the Surfrider Foundation, the Oregon Shores Coalition, Friends of Yaquina Bay and Lincoln County Citizens for Clean Water.

The petition is a precursor to a potential legal challenge. DEQ officials say they're reviewing the request, and have 60 days to either agree to reconsider the permit, or to deny the request.

The Surfrider Foundation, a California group with a chapter in Newport, is leading the opposition to the permit.

Georgia-Pacific discharges 3 million to 15 million gallons of treated wastewater each day from its Toledo mill, seven miles from downtown Newport, into Yaquina Bay, from an outfall located about 3,800 feet offshore, or about three-quarters of a mile.

The wastewater is treated biologically in aerated lagoons at the mill before it is discharged, and looks like black coffee when it flows into the ocean, said Steve Schurbusch, senior water quality specialist and DEQ's lead permit writer on the Georgia-Pacific permit.

The effluent doesn't just go out in the ocean and disappear, McComb said. In fact, she said, denizens of Nye Beach have a name for what happens when wind conditions sometimes bring the discharge close to shore: the black plume.

The company's previous permit - officially, it's called a National Pollution Discharge Elimination System, required under the federal Clean Water Act - expired in 2001, and was not renewed until August 2005, according to the Surfrider Foundation.

When members of the public complained that the DEQ hadn't provided adequate notice of the permit renewal, the agency withdrew its approval and reopened the public record, according to the Surfrider Foundation. John Ruscigno, water quality manager for the DEQ's western region, said his agency put out its regular public notice before the first approval, but didn't receive any comment.

That second round of the process spurred numerous comments from citizens and environmental groups. The DEQ responded to the comments and on July 14 approved the discharge permit again. "We made several changes to the permit as a result of those public comments," Ruscigno said.

The mixing zone is the area in the ocean where the wastewater comes out the pipe and where pollutants become diluted. The environmental groups say DEQ nearly doubled the size of the mixing zone.

Schnurbusch said that assertion is debatable. He said that, in the old permit, the size of the mixing zone was ambiguous. It was the shape of a triangle, and was allowed to move depending on the currents.

In the new permit, regulators assumed that the old mixing zone was really two triangles, depending on the currents, and made the new mixing zone the shape of a rectangle with about the same size, he said.

The environmental groups also say the DEQ did not take into account the leachate from the Marion County landfill that is trucked periodically to the Georgia-Pacific mill for treatment, then discharged with the wastewater.

"We need to look at what's in" the leachate, Ruscigno said.

McComb said DEQ officials may not have realized that citizens are becoming more concerned about water quality, and about the idea of private industry dumping pollutants on public lands.

"I think they're incredibly understaffed and overworked," she said.

Ruscigno agrees, but said the DEQ staff members wouldn't write a wastewater permit they weren't prepared to defend.

"They're not mindless bureaucrats going through the motions," he said.

He said it's possible that the agency staff members missed something or that they disagree with some assertions made by the environmentalists.

In a statement, Georgia-Pacific's Tom Picciano said the company is confident that DEQ will take the same science-based approach in evaluating the merits of the petition.