HELENA – Conservation groups have reached an agreement with federal and state environmental regulators to develop cleanup plans by 2014 for 28 Montana watersheds that are habitat for threatened trout and other native aquatic species.
The agreement appears to resolve a 14-year lawsuit filed by the conservation groups after the Environmental Protection Agency identified more than 900 pollutants in Montana lakes, rivers and streams that marked them as too polluted or degraded to meet water quality standards.
Friends of the Wild Swan and the Alliance for the Wild Rockies are the lead plaintiffs in the 1997 lawsuit against the EPA and Montana Department of Environmental Quality. They accused the regulators of failing to set a schedule for cleaning up those lakes and streams.
Those groups said this agreement, six months in the making and finalized last week, will help the recovery of the threatened bull trout and protect other native species and protect drinking water.
“We really wanted to make sure cold-water fish habitat was protected and improved,” Friends of the Wild Swan program director Arlene Montgomery said.
The agreement requires the EPA and DEQ to calculate the maximum amount of pollutants that those 28 watersheds can take in and still meet water quality standards.
Those total maximum daily loads, called TMDLs, would be set for 664 pollutants, from arsenic to zinc to sediment for the Clark Fork, Flathead, Blackfoot, Bitterroot and other watersheds by Dec. 31, 2014.
There are several ways to meet those pollutant load limits, such as by refining discharge permits or cleaning abandoned mines, said Dean Yashan of the Montana DEQ’s water quality program. But in most cases, the department or watershed groups will ask individual landowners or businesses to take voluntary actions to reduce the pollutants, such as by diverting grazing cattle that may be adding sediment to a polluted waterway.
U.S. District Judge Donald Molloy in 2003 originally gave the EPA and DEQ until 2012 to develop the cleanup plans. But Alliance for the Wild Rockies executive director Mike Garrity said the conservation groups were willing to extend that time because the agencies’ approach included entire watersheds instead of individual waterways.
“If you clean up just the one stream and leave the other tributaries alone, you don’t really clean up the watershed,” Garrity said. “We gave them a little more time because we think they’re doing a better job.”
Jason Gildea, the EPA’s TMDL planner, said developing cleanup plans by watershed instead of individual waterways is a more efficient use of time and money.
“They believe and we believe this is the best way to do things, it just took a while to get there,” Gildea said.
He and Yashan said work implementing these plans was already under way. More than 40 watershed cleanup plans have been completed over the past decade, and once these 28 watersheds are completed by 2014 as part of the agreement, there will still be several more years of work to do, Yashan said.