Not for nothing, but this post was hard to write straight-faced. I feel like this should be a light your hair on fire moment for this county commission and their constituents. I can’t believe people aren’t screaming at the county commissioners demanding to know why they didn’t stand up for public health and institute a measly $10 annual fee. Even the high end of $54 A YEAR seems like a steal compared to toxins in your drinking water.

The Thurston County commission passed a new plan to manage septic systems last winter.

A new set of county commissioners were seated and voted to strip the ability to actually pay for the plan a few months later. A $10 annual fee was just too much to help ensure clean, drinkable water.

Then there was an outbreak of poisonous algae in Summit Lake. According to the state Department of Health, malfunctioning septic systems are one of the likely causes of a poisonous algae outbreak.
The problem on Summit Lake is that the same residents who live along the lake and use septic systems to deal with their human waste also depend on the lake for their drinking water.

Do we know for sure that septic systems are the cause of excess nutrients in Summit Lake that caused a poisonous algae outbreak? Well, no, we don’t. But that we don’t know this is the main problem.

Any sort of expanded monitoring or education that could have done anything to prevent a situation like the one at Summit Lake will go wanting for lack of funding.

In the approved, but apparently unfunded septic plan, the county specifically called out Summit Lake as a very vulnerable spot for mismanaged septics. Said the plan:

Summit Lake, which is used by most residents for their drinking water source, shall be designated as a Sensitive Area. All wastewater disposal systems in the Summit Lake watershed shall have required operational certificates and dye testing to assure that routine inspections and maintenance is completed at least every three years and failing systems are identified and repaired. 

The plan also pointed out that Summit Lake, despite being the water source for drinking water for people living on Summit Lake, presents some real issues about how exactly septic tanks wouldn’t pollute that source:

Its steep slopes, shallow soils, and generally small lots sizes
make siting and functioning of on-site sewage systems around the lake difficult. A 1992-1997 sanitary
survey found 58 systems failing (18%) – the majority of which were repaired. Surface waters cannot be
adequately protected from contamination to be safely used as a domestic water supply without treatment.
A public health advisory issued in 1987 advises against consumption of untreated lake water at Summit
Lake. A comprehensive program would ensure routine inspection and maintenance of all OSS within
the Summit Lake basin and identification and correction of failing systems. The Summit Lake watershed
should be considered for special area designation due to the serious threat posed to the drinking water
supply by failing septic systems.

Twenty years ago they knew that 18 percent of the septics were failing because they went out and looked. Just like when they found 14 percent failing on Henderson Inlet.

Here’s the underlying point: Since 1997 the county hasn’t gone back to take another look at septics around Summit Lake. Now the water has too many toxins to drink. The reason we can’t rule out septics as the source for algae with toxins is because we haven’t looked.

Nothing that I’ve seen from the county says that they can do anything to track down the source of the algae. The very least you could say is that $10 a month could have gone to a small bit of dye testing to see if in twenty years any septics around the lake started not working.

Right now what the county is doing is just waiting for sunlight and time to deal with the algae. But, I’m sure a more progressive standpoint would be get out there and start figuring out why we have a public health crisis on Summit Lake to begin with.

The main thing we need to get to the bottom of is what science brought this about because it has been alleged that 14 percent of septic systems failing each year — that is pure malarkey. That means at the end of a seven-year period we would have had 98 percent of septic system fail, that is pure ludicrous.

Basically, there’s a fairly good estimate out there that somewhere around 14 percent of septics system are polluting into streams and bays each year. This data, in the case of Thurston County came from an on-site study of septic systems around Henderson Inlet in the late 90s.

What county staff did was put a dye into the septic systems around Henderson Inlet and 14 percent of the tested systems leaked that dye into places where they shouldn’t be leaking anything because septic systems shouldn’t be polluting. But they did.

What that particular study didn’t say is that 14 percent fail each year. Obviously, if you go around and test septic systems at one point in time and finding a failure rate, what you’re doing is finding how many septics would be failing at any given point. 

Commission Edwards apparently picked up his bad math from Glen Morgan’s blog.

What is a little more interesting is that the 1999 study took a look at two places, Henderson Inlet and the Thurston County stretch of the Nisqually reach. The Nisqually reach septics had an even worse failure rate, in the neighborhood of 20 percent.

Morgan took a shot at the 14 percent number by pointing out that repair permits issued by the county indicate that less that one percent of the septics in the Deschutes watershed had failed. That assumes a one to one ratio of permits for repair and actually polluting septics.

But, it would seem that a failing to the point of needing obvious repair and a polluting septic are not the same thing:

Sometimes a (septic) failure is obvious, other times it’s not so obvious and not
an easy thing to confirm. When a failure is not obvious but water
quality data or other information seems to implicate a system as a
problem system, additional measures must be taken.  

Dye testing is an effective way to verify a failure, but
must be done correctly based on established
procedures. Little is more definitive than seeing
bright green dye flowing in a backyard or in surface
water after passing through a property’s plumbing. 

Waiting for a homeowner to ask for a permit to repair their septic system is a very low bar to estimate failing septic systems. And, not all backed up or broken septics are polluting. And, certainly, there are septic systems that would work from the point of view of the homeowner but would leach pollutants.

Dye testing, the type of study that the 14 percent number came from, is much more accurate to asses the one thing that we’re talking about here, whether a septic system is polluting.

[EDIT 12/26/16 at 3:50 p.m.] I added an explanation of the chart and added a link to Steve Salmi’s post at Green Pages that I meant to include.

Okay, so it’s true that there was more voter participation by south county voters in the last county commission election.

But, I’ve have had a hard time reconciling the data I see in this chart below with the map I put together in that linked post above.

What the data suggests is that urban Democrats will not win a county commission seat unless they are competitive in unincorporated parts of the county — which even in a high-turnout, Democratic wave election like 2008 represent the majority of votes. In 2016 both of the Democratic candidates got clobbered in that realm. To make matters worse, as I discuss here, neither Hulse nor kindred spirit Jim Cooper did very well in Lacey or Tumwater. Interestingly, these two cities saw their proportion of total votes jump 2.5 percent over 2008 while Olympia went down by .1 percent. 

This is why I suspect that in 2016 something more was going on than high turnout in the south county. Steve Klein may be at least partially right — Donald Trump had coattails. However, the most important single factor may have been that Gary Edwards and John Hutchings ran as independents, which appealed to swing voters throughout the county.

Back a few days after the election, Ken Balsley had this to say:

I’ll be honest, I really doubted Ken’s assessment of the election of two party-independent conservative candidates over two Democratic ones. I was looking at the graph below, and I saw something totally different in the election returns:

What I saw was voter confusion, a thick-enough layer of voters that wouldn’t vote for a Republican but would vote for a party-independent conservative across every precinct, from the most conservative ones to the most liberal.

But, that chart doesn’t deal with voter turnout, only percentage of vote across a precinct.

I had to wait until the precinct level turnout data was available earlier today, but I was able to put together this map (based on this spreadsheet) that compares ballots issued against votes returned for conservative candidates.

And, if you do that, this is the map you get:

Just a quick word of warning: this is the back-of-the-napkinest of back-of-the-napkin maps. Because precincts have changed a lot since 2008, I did a lot of deleting of precincts because they didn’t match up anymore. That said, think the analysis stands.

This isn’t a map about winning percentage, but rather conservative turnout compared to possible turnout. And, it really shocked me. It really does show that conservative turnout really did increase this year when there were two independents on the ballot and that turnout was centered mostly in south county.

If I had been right, the colors would have been much less stratified across the map, much more dark in the north county and much more bright in the south county. But, the pattern here is clear. Conservative voters were much more active this year in the south compared to the last four commission cycles.