Mindy Roberts of Washington Conservation Action said someone asked her a few years ago about the frequent sewage spills occurring in Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway.

“My answer was, ‘What sewage spills?’” Mindy recalled, quickly realizing that if she didn’t know about sewage spills in her own city, then hardly anybody else was likely to know about them either. Mindy serves as director of the Puget Sound Program for WCA, an environmental group.

Last week, thanks to the work of Mindy and many others, the Washington Legislature passed into law the Sewage Spill Right to Know Act, which requires the Department of Ecology to set up a website to rapidly notify the public of sewage spills that occur anywhere in the state. The result, Mindy says, will be increased safety for swimmers, recreational shellfish harvesters and others.

Before she went to work for WCA, Mindy worked for Ecology, where she helped develop computer models to predict the effects of sewage effluent on water quality in Puget Sound, particularly addressing the problems of low dissolved oxygen. Now, one of her major efforts is pushing for upgrades to sewage treatment plants to improve conditions for marine life. She wonders how the number of sewer overflows escaped her attention.

“Here I am, a very engaged Tacoma resident, someone who gets out on the water regularly and someone who works on modernizing sewage practices in the Puget Sound region as my day job — and I had no idea,” Mindy said. “That’s when I started looking into sewage spills and looking for information on Ecology’s website. I had a suspicion that spills were happening more frequently than anyone suspected.”

Sewage treatment facilities are required to notify Ecology immediately when a sewage spill occurs. That allows state and county health officials to close commercial shellfish beds and post public beaches, something that may not always happen. And getting spill information out to people in the local community has been hit or miss. Details of the spills often remain within the reporting files at Ecology.

The new Sewage Spill Right to Know Act (HB 1670), which was supported unanimously by Democrats and Republicans alike, requires Ecology to set up a website within 14 months to alert people to the location of intentional or accidental discharges of untreated or under-treated sewage. Notifications must include the date and time of each spill, the estimated volume and potentially affected areas. Further information must be added as it becomes available.

As first introduced, the original bill included a number of additional provisions, including a requirement for an online map showing the location of recent spills and a mandate to post the spill information within four hours of notification. To reduce the cost of the notification program, the Legislature stripped out the map, time limits and other requirements, bringing the cost of the program down to $89,000 for the first two years and $74,000 for each succeeding biennium.

Rep. Victoria Hunt, D-Issaquah, the prime sponsor of the bill, said hundreds of sewage spills occur every year, and people should be able to find out about the pollution before they go swimming or visit a shellfish beach. The Sewage Spill Right to Know Act will avoid surprises when it comes to raw sewage, and it will provide information for anyone who wishes to advocate for cleaner water, she told the Senate Environment, Energy and Technology Committee.

Rep. Mary Dye, R-Pomeroy, expressed her whole-hearted support for the bill before it passed out of the House Environment and Energy Committee.

“We couldn’t be more pleased with this bill,” Dye said, “because we believe we do have a water-quality crisis in this state. Effective reporting of spills into Puget Sound means a lot to us.”

She encouraged Ecology to take on the task of mapping the spills, saying the agency should have the resources to add that element.

In preparing support for the legislation, Washington Conservation Action hired an intern, Autumn Adams, to research information on spills that had been compiled by Ecology in a database. The database was not easy to navigate, Mindy said, but it yielded some interesting information.

“In 10 weeks,” she added, “Autumn turned up evidence of more than 200 sewage spills over the past 5 years, and she only had time to review the reports from 12 dischargers. Some of the spills made the news, but most did not. And there was no systemic approach to reporting sewage spills across the state in an easy-to-find location.”

Ecology officials acknowledge reports of about 300 sewage spills each year in Washington state.

After learning about all these spills, Mindy began talking to people in affected areas. She gathered numerous stories about people swimming or harvesting seafood from various waterways before they learned that they had been in the midst of human waste.

During her research into laws in other states, Mindy discovered that at least 13 states plus the Great Lakes region had laws on the books addressing the rights of people to know about sewage spills in their communities. The various state laws were compiled by the water and sewage consulting firm Trinnex, which posted relevant links on its website. The form of public notification varies by state but may include email, websites, phone connections and,  in Connecticut, a statewide map.

As she learned more about sewage spills, Mindy said she reached out to other environmental organizations, including Surfrider and Puget Soundkeeper Alliance. Along with others, the groups developed a plan for legislation, which eventually became one of this year’s top priorities of the Washington Environmental Priorities Coalition.

The groups approached Rep. Vandana Slatter, D-Bellevue, who agreed to sponsor the bill. When Slatter was appointed to a vacant Senate seat, Rep. Victoria Hunt continued to  shepherd the bill through the Legislature, where it was greeted with unanimous votes in every committee that reviewed the bill and finally with unanimous votes in both the full House and Senate.

The final bill, amended at the last minute in the Senate, removed a provision requiring the Department of Ecology to set up a public notification system, such as direct email, and it dropped requirements for annual reports listing sewage spills and other information. Estimates of cost dropped dramatically as the bill was slimmed down, from about $1 million for the first two years — when it was assumed that Ecology would need to hire staff to post notices 24 hours a day, seven days a week — to $89,000 when the only requirement was an easy-to-use website with data posted from reports that sewage-treatment facilities already submit to Ecology.

Mindy said mapping software is available to allow the agency to show the location graphically with minimal difficulty.

“Once you have the latitude and longitude of a spill, then providing a viewable map with dots for active spills, or bigger or smaller dots based on the volume of past spills, would be both straightforward and also extremely useful to the broader public,” she noted. 

One provision retained in the final version of the bill requires Ecology to look for ways to provide information for area residents who are not proficient in the English language. Don Gourlie, legislative policy director for Puget Sound Partnership, the state agency that oversees Puget Sound recovery, said such an effort would truly serve everyone.

“We, as a state agency, have a hard time finding information on sewage spills,” Gourlie  told the House Environment and Energy Committee. “Having it provided in an accessible form would benefit our ability to serve the public.”

Leslie Connelly, strategic planning manager for Ecology’s Water Quality Program, told the committee that her agency is committed to the transparency of information and only needs financial support from the Legislature to do what is requested.

“We recognize that the current reporting system is not user-friendly,” she said, “nor does it provide real-time notification of when a sewage spill occurs.”

The legislation, which awaits the governor’s signature, requires Ecology to get the notification system up and running by July 1, 2026, but Mindy said she hopes the agency is willing and able to get it done sooner.