Montana’s proposed new clean water metrics create consternation | Local News

It also left the Worden Ballantine Yellowstone County Water and Sewer District scrambling to find a new source of drinking water. Water treatment systems are expensive, complex and out of reach for many rural water districts.  

For the Worden Ballantine water district, relief finally came last year in the form of $4.74 million in federal aid that it will use to essentially build a whole new water system. Investigators were never able to find the source of the nitrate contamination, so the water district dug four new wells from which it now draws its clean water. 

For Richard Parks, a fly fishing guide based in Gardiner and a water quality advocate with the Northern Plains Resource Council, it illustrates the difficulty and expense wrapped up in water treatment. 

He argues it’s one of the big reasons municipalities in Montana are looking for ways to relax the state’s water quality standards. 

“While removing nutrients is doable, it costs money,” he said.  

The state, during the last legislative session, passed Senate Bill 358 in an attempt to create a more flexible solution to how the state monitors and responds to water quality. It replaces the state’s old numeric system with a narrative system for quantifying the amounts of nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, in the state’s waterways. 

Nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus are important fertilizers but too much in a stream or river can create dangerous algae blooms that choke the life out of a water way.

Parks, who’s livelihood depends on the health of the rivers in Paradise Valley, believes the state’s implementation of a new monitoring system will damage the water quality in Montana. 

“A completely misbegotten and abominable step to take,” he said. 

Louis Engels, the water quality superintendent for the City of Billings, sees it from a different perspective. He looks at the city’s new $75 million wastewater treatment plant, built in 2019, that’s designed specifically to remove higher numbers of nitrogen and phosphates from wastewater, and sees a pretty good system.

He’s convinced Billings and the other major municipalities in Montana are doing as much to keep the state’s waterways clean as just about any other group. Overall, Montana’s eight largest cities have collectively invested $260 million in treating wastewater to reach these specific levels. 

“We’re not going backwards,” he said. “We’ve invested more in water quality than anyone in the region.”

The law certainly doesn’t roll back water standards,” said Kelly Lynch, an attorney with the Montana League of Cities and Towns. Montana’s constitution requires that the state “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment…for present and future generations.”

Lynch helped craft the legislation that became SB 358, which itself doesn’t dictate water quality standards but instead creates a framework for it. 

Stakeholders will spend the year evaluating the data that’s been collected from waterways across the state for decades and create a system that can set specific standards for the various watersheds across the state. 

Most importantly, the state-issued permits that dictate exactly the amounts of nutrients municipalities are allowed to release into their waterways remain in force and by law can’t be rolled back, Lynch said. 

Under those permit requirements, municipal wastewater treatment plants capture and remove roughly 90% of the nitrogen and phosphorus and other nutrient waste in the water they process.

Ryan Sudbury, deputy city attorney in Missoula who specializes in water quality issues, said his city has worked hard to be proactive and pragmatic in its approach to treating water.

“We just want to make sure the things we’re doing make sense,” he said. 

The state’s new plan for monitoring water quality moves to what’s known as an adaptive management plan, which allows regions within the state to create the standards that will address the specific type of pollution they see. 

“A site-specific approach would better serve the stakeholders in that region,” said Amanda McInnis, an area manager and wastewater specialist with HDR in Missoula. 

The adaptive management plan, specific to each watershed, dictates what’s required, she said. 

“We’ve got to look at all of the watershed,” she said. 

Brian Heaston, senior water resource engineer for the City of Bozeman, is hopeful SB 358 will do what it’s set out to do. A big part of that will be how it utilizes the science to dictate water quality, he said.

Rather than disregard the data that’s been used to create state standards up until now, he sees the law requiring municipalities to rely on good, accurate contemporary data to make decisions on how they satisfy water quality standards going forward.

“It’s utilizing site-specific data collected at a watershed site,” he said. “We’re building on the science.”

Parks, the fly fishing guide in Gardiner, believes data is the key if the state is going to use the adaptive management plan system and he’s not convinced the new law does enough to require the collection of good data moving forward. 

“You’ve got to understand where you’re trying to go,” he said. “Without the standard you’ve got no objective.”

Bozeman draws much of its drinking water from the East Gallatin River and the city has spent years and more than $250,000 studying the impact of nutrients on the nearly 30-mile stretch of the river before it meets up with the Gallatin. 

Collecting the right data from the right places allows the regions where these watersheds exist to better understand the impact nutrients have on their waterways and how best to protect them, Heaston said.

And the best way to do it is by requiring those specific regions to figure it out. The state’s too big to do it efficiently on a statewide level, he said.

“We believe we are a primary steward of the aquatic environment of the East Gallatin River,” Heaston said. “We want to see it succeed.” 

One of the tallest hurdles the state faces as it works to better regulate water quality is what’s known as non-point source dischargers. 

Cities and towns across the state are relatively easy for the state to manage. The majority of municipalities in Montana have some type of water treatment plant, which the state regulates as a point-source discharger of treated wastewater. 

Point-source is the state’s designation for any recognized source of discharged wastewater, which typically means a city pipe releasing water into the wild. 

What’s harder for the state to regulate are non-point sources, those entities outside of municipalities that still release polluted water into a waterway. These sources usually exist on county land and come from agricultural and septic sources.

And the state has no system in place to regulate them.

It’s a concern for both municipal water managers and environmentalists. The state has seen record growth in the last two years and clean water advocates worry it will increasingly push development into more rural areas of the state. 

And that push, they say, could lead to higher levels of nutrient pollution finding its way into rivers and streams with no way for the state to regulate it.

“The state is going to have to address that in some meaningful way,” Heaston said. 

Engels, the water quality superintendent for Billings, agreed. The majority of nitrogen and phosphorus found in state waterways comes from sources other than cities and towns. And so municipalities can’t be the only ones responsible to keep the state’s water clean, he said. 

The original numeric standards for wastewater discharge put in place by the state were never implemented. A lawsuit filed by the Upper Missouri Waterkeeper, a water quality advocacy group based in Bozeman, put the requirements on hold until the courts figured out the best approach. 

SB 358 was designed in part as a work around and Engels sees it as a better option anyway. The old numeric standard for water quality was never possible to reach, he said. 

“The technology does not exist,” he said. 

To get close, city water treatment plants would have to install reverse osmosis filtration systems and there still would be nutrient levels it couldn’t reach. And then there’s the cost, Engel said.

It would cost Billings $30 million to install a reverse osmosis filtration system and there would be no guarantee it would remove nitrogen and phosphorus down to the numbers required under the old numeric system. 

That’s a cost Billings would end up passing onto ratepayers, which no one likes, Engels said. But it would be especially burdensome on smaller townships — many with aging water treatment plants — that simply don’t have the resources or the population base to float the cost. For Engels it’s about prioritizing limited resources. 

Sudbury, with the Missoula city attorney’s office, agreed. 

“Even if we built it, it wouldn’t result in measurable differences,” he said. “We’re not opposed to spending money to treat nutrients, we just think there’s a better way to do it.”

Municipal water treatment systems across the state remove 90% of the nitrogen and phosphorus and other nutrient waste from their wastewater. To get at the remaining 10% becomes a game of diminishing returns.

“It’s incredibly expensive and incredibly energy intensive,” Heaston said. “Is the benefit worth the cost?”

Parks acknowledged it’s a complex problem with no easy answer. The problem, he said, is that the state’s water quality hangs in the balance. If the state gets it wrong, rivers and streams end up damaged, which can impact everything from Montana’s quality of life to its tourism industry. 

“I don’t think any of us pretend there’s a simple solution to this,” he said. “And that’s my problem with SB 358. It goes for the simple solution.”