Sequim city councilmen pushed, Clallam County commissioners pulled, but Sequim’s proposed $21 million regional sewer project remained unresolved Monday.
Jim Bay, Sequim public works director, said time was running out for him to design a new sewage treatment plant.
The question was how many communities would it serve. He said he didn’t want to design a plant and then amend the design with additions.
The whole proposal would include the Carlsborg urban growth area west of Sequim, and Blyn and Sequim Bay State Park to the east, plus the Port of Port Angeles’ John Wayne Marina.
However, County Commissioner Steve Tharinger, D-Dungeness, said Carlsborg needed a water system more than sewers, and that water service remained frozen by the state Department of Ecology.
Issues of sewers, sewage treatment and water service were thorny issues of growth that dominated discussions at a joint meeting Monday of the county commissioners and the Sequim City Council and their staffs in Port Angeles.
The county wants Carlsborg served with water by the Clallam County Public Utility District. However, Ecology won’t permit drilling a new well field until it issues rules for Water Resource Inventory Area 18, better known as WRIA 18, which includes the Dungeness River watershed.
Those rules — and a subsequent water supply for Carlsborg — probably won’t come for six more months, Tharinger said.
He added that commissioners were trying to spur Ecology to speed up the process, but that the task was proving difficult.
For all or just Sequim?
In the meantime, Bay said he wondered whether to design a sewer plant “for everybody or just the city of Sequim.”
Bay also urged the county to suspend another issue — how much clean water the system will recharge into the Dungeness River and Jimmycomelately Creek aquifers.
“We want to put together the whole project as soon as we can,” said Sequim City Manager Bill Elliott, “once we find out who’s in and who’s not in.”
The county also wants to complete a build-out study –how many homes and businesses eventually will fill the Carlsborg urban growth area — before joining the sewer project.
