PORT ANGELES — The City Council gave the go-ahead this week to a storm water project that will involve uprooting a lane of First Street downtown.

The project, expected to last between eight and 12 weeks, will occur either late this year or early 2011 as long as the permits are awarded by the state Department of Ecology, Glenn Cutler, city public works and utilities director, told the council Tuesday.

The city, on behalf of the National Park Service, will disconnect storm water drains that collect runoff from the road from the sewer system along First Street between Lincoln and Valley streets and create a new storm water collection system.

The $1.6 million project, funded by the park service, is connected to the two large public undertakings: removal of the two Elwha River dams and elimination of sewage overflows in Port Angeles.

Removal of the dams will begin around summer 2011 and take two to three years to complete.

Tribe to be connected

As part of the dam removal project, the Lower Elwha Klallam tribe will become connected to the city’s sewer system.

The tribe needs to be connected because the tribe’s septic systems are expected to become defunct after the dams are removed.

Some of the sediment held behind the dams is expected to settle in the riverbed downstream.

Olympic National Park spokeswoman Barb Maynes said a raised streambed will lead to a higher groundwater level, and threaten the septic tanks.

Offset impact

But for the tribe to be connected to the city’s sewer system, the Park Service has to offset any impact it would have on Port Angeles. That includes its contribution to sewage overflows.

In order to offset the tribe’s contribution to the overflows, the Park Service — through the First Street project — has chosen to prevent an equal amount of storm water from going into the sewers, roughly 430,000 gallons.

The overflows occur when storm water, caused by rainfall, exceeds the sewer system’s capacity.

Initially, the Park Service was going to build a tank to store the same amount of effluent during an overflow event.

At $5.4 million, it deemed that move too costly.

While the Park Service found it cost-effective to disconnect storm water drainage from the sewer system, the city has maintained that doing so citywide would be too expensive.

Disconnect projects

Cutler said there are few areas in the city where disconnect projects, like the one funded by the Park Service, would be worth the cost.

“We could do some source separation for our road network,” he said, “but we don’t have enough of it, such as it is economical to do.”

“The downtown area happens to be very highly concentrated,” he added, “that one you can do.

“There’s not enough around the city to make it economical.”

The city estimates that disconnecting all storm water — including runoff from roads and rain water from roof downspouts — from the city’s sewers would cost over $60 million.

Disconnects would cause another problem, city Deputy Engineer Steve Sperr said.

The storm water, like all other runoff, would drain into the harbor and nearby streams untreated.

Sperr said the city expects Ecology to require it to treat all storm water at outfalls in the next five years. More storm water would mean higher treatment cost, he said.

Storm water that drains into the sewer system, both from street runoff and roof spouts, is treated at the treatment plant as long as the sewer system doesn’t overflow.

Rayonier tank

To resolve the overflow problem, which the city must do by 2016, it chose to try to acquire the existing 5-million-gallon tank on Rayonier Inc.’s former pulp mill site.

That plan is projected to cost about $38 million.

The tank would temporarily store sewage that would otherwise overflow into Port Angeles Harbor, and then drain it into the nearby wastewater treatment plant.

But the plan has its own hurdles.

The city needs ownership of the tank by fall to remain on schedule. If it misses the deadline, Ecology could fine it $10,000 per day.

The city is currently relying on acquiring the tank through the Port Angeles Harbor-Works Development Authority, which it is negotiating the purchase of the 75-acre waterfront property that the tank sits on.

If an agreement can’t be reached between the public development authority and Rayonier, the city intends to acquire the tank and easements for the wastewater pipes through eminent domain.

The City Council on Tuesday also approved the hiring of an appraiser to tell it how much the tank and easements are worth in case eminent domain is used as a solution.

To comply with Ecology, the city cannot have more than one overflow a year at each of its four overflow sites.

The city averages about 32 million gallons of sewage overflows annually.

City officials say the tank will put the city in compliance with Ecology, but don’t refute that there still may be some overflows.

No new downspouts or other storm water drains are allowed to be connected to the sewer, so future growth will not add to the overflow problem, Cutler said.

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Reporter Tom Callis can be reached at 360-417-3532 or at tom.callis@peninsuladailynews.com.