WEATHER
Next month, the City of Gig Harbor will begin one of its biggest and most expensive projects to date: expanding the capacity of the city’s waste water treatment plant.
Spanning several years and costing nearly $18 million, the endeavor involves updating the city’s onshore sewer lines along North Harborview Drive, expanding the existing treatment plant and constructing a sewer line to carry treated waste water outside of Gig Harbor Bay into Puget Sound.
But a key component of the project is still missing; without it, the expansion will stop dead in its tracks.
The city has yet to obtain permission from the U.S. Coast Guard to bore through a spit at the base of the harbor, where a lighthouse and “Welcome to Gig Harbor” sign now stand.
Despite years of effort by city officials, the piece of land has never been in the city’s possession,
“It’s water access only,” said City Administrator Rob Karlinsey. “We can’t reach it by land. It’s always kind of been a de facto park.”
The sewer line that will eventually dump the city’s treated water into the Sound must — according Washington State Department of Ecology guidelines — exit the harbor by passing through that spit.
Because the Coast Guard owns that piece of property, the city does not have the jurisdiction — at this point — to bore through it and lay the necessary pipe.
City council member Tim Payne said getting that permission is a top priority.
“It’s becoming urgent,” he said about getting the go-ahead from the Coast Guard. “It has been known for a number of years now that we would have this outfall project, and we knew that it would be highly likely that we’d need to do a directional bore through the spit.”
Although laying the pipe is a later step in the project — it probably won’t happen until next year — it is a lynchpin in the overall extension process.
The first step, being called the North Harborview Construction and Sewer Outfall Expansion Project, is well underway.
Earlier this week, the city awarded a bid to the contractor who will begin installing a new sewer line under North Harborview Drive.
Once that onshore portion of the project is complete, the marine portion of the project will begin.
That portion necessitates laying a pipe along the floor of Gig Harbor Bay and into Puget Sound, in order to accommodate the higher volume of waste water created by an expanded treatment plant and sewer system.
The treatment plant’s capacity will be expanded from its current 1 million gallons to 1.6 million gallons during Phase I of the project — which should be completed by 2009 — and to 2.4 million gallons some years later, during Phase II.
But if the city does not have permission to bore through the spit, those 1.6 million gallons will have nowhere to go.
Standards from the state Department of Ecology require high quantities of treated water to be dumped into a larger body of water than Gig Harbor Bay.
“Every outfall is site-specific,” said waste water treatment plant supervisor Darrell Winans, who has worked closely with the Department of Ecology on this project. “The bay does exchange fairly well, but it’s fairly shallow. If you’re dumping 2.4 million gallons a day, you’re going to see an upwelling of water.”
To avoid that upwelling, those 2.4 million gallons must be transported into the Sound.
And the pipe cannot pass through the navigational ship channel leading into the harbor because water depth in the channel is not significant enough, and because of standards from the state department of Fish and Wildlife.
That leaves the spit as the only option.
“It’s the spit or nothing,” Payne said.
At this point, the city is not seeking ownership of the spit, although Payne admits that situation “would be ideal.”
Instead, all that is needed is some proof from the Coast Guard that Gig Harbor has permission to punch a hole in the spit. That proof could be as simple as a letter from a ranking official at the Coast Guard, Payne said.
The city has been attempting to obtain that permission for a few years now — and has received almost no response from the Coast Guard.
“It’s been in the design state for, I believe, four or five years, but prior to now, it hasn’t been pursued with as much effort,” Mayor Chuck Hunter said. “We need (the spit) more now than we did ever before.”
Jeff Langhelm, a city engineer working on the outfall project, credits the unusual nature of the city’s request as one reason why the Coast Guard has yet to grant access.
“It’s not an over-the-counter permit,” he said.
Hunter agreed with Langhelm, adding that this sort of request is likely not top-of-mind with the Coast Guard, especially because of the heightened security issues that have taken precedence since Sept. 11.
“It’s probably very low-priority from the Coast Guard’s point of view,” Hunter said. “We’re just not big enough to get their attention.”
Earlier this month, Hunter, Payne and other city officials traveled Washington, D.C., to request federal funding for other city improvement projects. While there, they learned that U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell is chairwoman of the Senate’s Commerce subcommittee on Oceans, Atmosphere, Fisheries and Coast Guard.
City officials met with Cantwell in hopes that the senator could elicit some response from the Coast Guard.
Ciaran Clayton, communications director at Cantwell’s office, confirmed that the senator, “made a call immediately to the Coast Guard to figure out what’s going on” and would contact the agency again if there is no response this week.
Clayton could not confirm whether the City of Gig Harbor’s request to gain access to the spit was unusual or not.
Obtaining that access is also essential because completing the outfall extension project affects the overall development of Gig Harbor. Since the waste water treatment plant is currently at capacity, there is an unofficial moratorium on additional building within the city for the next two years.
For those reasons, Payne ranks the waste water treatment plant and sewer outfall project as the “most important” issue facing the city right now.
Karlinsey agreed.
“The whole thing is being driven by development,” he said.
Payne said he is unsure what the city will do if the Coast Guard will not grant access to the spit, but he sees no reason why the permission would not be granted. He suspects it is just a matter of finding the right contact — and soon.
“The urgency has risen, because now we have our funding, we have some of the preliminary projects starting to happen,” he said. “So it’s just imperative that we get some sort of clarity out of the Coast Guard.”
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