No Brightwater? Put a cork in it

I love all the wailing about the cost of building a sewage treatment plant in Snohomish County. Hello! How does everyone imagine it ended up so expensive?

Certainly, the $1.6 billion price tag is huge. It's a damn big number. And the annoying, easy-to-mock part is the $140 million for mitigation. Depending on which side of the table one is sitting on, it translates as either bribery or extortion.

Let's start with a few basics. Everyone poops. No one wants to live next to where all of the sewage ends up. After some nasty experiences turning Washington waterways into cesspools, society agreed the waste ought to be adequately treated before discharge.

If no one had any more children and newcomers were scared off at the borders and we never built any more houses or allowed employers to start businesses or expand, then we probably could get by with no more sewage-treatment plants.

All the horrific expense of building Brightwater — a fine specimen of a name — would be wholly avoidable. Cap Snohomish County's population and say, thanks, but no thanks to new jobs.

Am I going too fast?

So we all chug along, and lo and behold, a couple of big sewage-treatment plants in King County at Renton and Seattle's West Point are reaching capacity after having already been expanded at least once, each. Waste from Snohomish and North King County has been sent south for years to Renton, but that community made an entirely fair announcement.

Yes, they would eventually expand their plant again, but they wanted to reserve space for South King County's own demonstrable growth. Up north, it's time for you all to take care of yourselves.

Vested with regional authority by the state Legislature, King County Executive Ron Sims began the thankless task of looking for a site to build a sewage-treatment plant. Years pass, blah blah blah, and Brightwater is located at the confluence of Highway 522, Highway 9 and a whole lot of angry people.

Nothing about this is easy or inexpensive. Brightwater is about 14 miles away from its outfall, a word that defines where the treated output is released into Puget Sound about a mile offshore.

This is where the numbers get big and bigger for engineering and politics. That means state-of-the-art secondary treatment and unmitigated mitigation.

Putting Brightwater where Sims broke ground last month means the effluent has to travel through a very large pipe buried from 40 to 400 feet underground. The conveyance will be super-sized so it can eventually carry 54 million gallons of waste a day in 2040.

Did I mention the part about no one wanting to live next to a sewage-treatment plant? Odor control is a big, important commitment, and not inexpensive. The plant will be fully enclosed and everything going in will be scrubbed, spritzed, oxygenated, charcoaled, atomized, filtered and counseled about self-esteem issues.

If there is a mystery about whom to blame for the cost of the Taj Mapooh, the answer was provided by Agatha Christie in "Murder on the Orient Express." Everyone did it. Eleven permit-issuing, lawsuit-contemplating, delay-inducing jurisdictions all plunged a wish list into Brightwater's heaving budget.

Snohomish County whined and wheedled its way into $70 million, or half of the $140 million of walking-around money disbursed to keep the project on track. From treatment plant to outfall, the largesse covers parks, recreation, land costs, buffers, wetlands, stream restoration, art work and, well, tons of crap.

Remember dictum No. 1 — nobody wants to live next to a sewage treatment plant. Hence, landscaped bike paths and pedestrian walkways and wretched excess, unless one lives anywhere close by.

Maybe the cheesiest part was having Snohomish County negotiate behind a mask. That booming county is the ultimate beneficiary of a plethora of potties.

So Brightwater's cost is outrageous, or so it seems. Especially with a short memory. In 1991, after years of battling to expand the West Point plant beneath Discovery Park in Seattle, the roughly $540 million project was approved with more than $98 million in landscaping.

Have cities in other states magically done better? Those glib comparisons never hold up to examination.

Short of a pledge to quit going to the bathroom, Brightwater happens.

Lance Dickie's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times. His e-mail address is ldickie@seattletimes.com