Legal Action Brought Against Waterfront Construction

Posted by the Kenmore Crow | Filed under Construction

I received the following bit of news a couple weeks ago from some local citizens that have partnered with Waste Action Project, a Seattle-based “environmental protection organization” to bring legal action against Waterfront Construction, Inc. for alleged violations of the Clean Water Act (pdf of full text) in their activity at the LakePointe Mixed Use Development — a 45 acre site on the shore of Lake Washington at the mouth of the Sammamish River.

The notice alleges that Waterfront Construction “has violated and continues to violate the CWA (see Sections 301, 307, and 402, of the CWA, 33 USC §§ 1311, 1317, and 1342) and its National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit.

The list of offenses Waste Action Project are alleging are as follows:

  • discharges of bilge water
  • discharges of welding waste
  • illicit and/or unauthorized discharges
  • failure to monitor stormwater discharges
  • failure to adopt a stormwater pollution prevention plan

Over on YouTube, user crazyhazedaze has been posting videos of some of these activities since late last year.

Waterfront Construction has 60 days from September 10th to respond to the action before they will face a citizen lawsuit.

Water pollution has been an ongoing issue around the Puget Sound. According to a recent Seattle PostGlobe story, Washington State has plenty of violators of the Clean Water Act:

Even though 195 out of the Evergreen State’s 435 regulated facilities violated the Clean Water Act between 2004 and 2007, few got in trouble for it, according to exhaustive data posted at NYTimes.com. For every 100 violations in the state, there were only 8.6 enforcement actions.

And those are just the ones that were caught.

Clearly there is still plenty of work to do to ensure the cleanliness of our natural resources. We will continue to follow this developing story for you.

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Permalink | September 21st, 2009

3 Responses to “Legal Action Brought Against Waterfront Construction”

  1. James Lupori Says:
    September 23rd, 2009 at 9:30 PM

    It would be incredibly helpful if someone could provide the public with a schematic of the Lakepointe area. For most of us, this whole area is an unknown part of Kenmore and it’s hard to wrap one’s head around an issue without being able to visualize the situation. The videos do show “activities”; however, to the untrained eye, they don’t mean a lot. I realize that there is now a legal issue going on but I was wondering if you could get someone close to this issue to comment here on your blog.

  2. Ann Hurst Says:
    October 6th, 2009 at 10:46 AM

    See http://www.ecy.wa.gov/pubs/0109010.pdf for document that explains boundary of Kenmore Industrial Park, envisioned to be Lake Pointe.

  3. Elizabeth Mooney Says:
    October 6th, 2009 at 11:28 AM

    Great comment. I agree that it is incredibly hard to see Kenmore through the concrete operations’ equipment. Driving down Bothell Way in Kenmore looking at the fog emitted from that machinery blocks all view of the Lakepointe property. Kenmore Air gets a great view and boaters do as well. I might be wrong, but I think you can find a pretty nice, but old, photo of the property in the Kenmore draft Shoreline Master Plan Update document. Nice aerials.

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