The city, facing mounting fines for discharging contaminated sewage into the ocean, is urging state lawmakers to pass legislation that would weaken the very water-quality standards that a federal judge ruled the city violated for years.

The changes, if adopted, would raise the allowable levels for certain key pollutants in Hawai'i waters by as much as five times. But they also will make some standards more stringent.

Critics are concerned about easing up on the standards, particularly because the listed pollutants are at the heart of the city's dispute with environmental groups and the Environmental Protection Agency over contaminated discharges.

"It'll be breathtaking," Robert Harris, director of the Sierra Club's Hawai'i chapter, said of the substantially weaker standards.

But the city, with the state's concurrence, has told lawmakers that Hawai'i's standards — among the most stringent in the country — are outdated and should be revised based on national ones issued in 2006 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

The proposed changes, they say, are based on more current, better science and would continue to provide sufficient safeguards for Hawai'i beachgoers, seafood eaters and marine life.

"Bottom line, we think the public will be adequately protected if we use national standards," said Larry Lau, the state Department of Health's deputy director for environmental health.

Hawai'i's current water-quality measures have not been substantially revised for nearly three decades, according to city officials.

If the legislation passes, the new standards would be considered "interim" until the EPA, which must approve any changes, makes a decision.

The city is asking lawmakers to take quick action so it can use the new standards to help seek the elimination or reduction of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in fines from a pending lawsuit brought by the Sierra Club and two other organizations over sewage discharges. A federal judge last year found that the city from 1999 to 2007 committed thousands of violations of the current water-quality standards. The proposed changes, if adopted, would bring the city in compliance with one key measure used in that case and likely help reduce other violations.

The city also is hoping to use the interim standards to bolster its appeal to EPA over ordered upgrades to Honolulu's two main sewage-treatment plants, work that likely will cost more than $1 billion and could lead to sewer fee hikes for Honolulu customers.

The federal agency in January mandated the upgrades after ruling that wastewater discharged from the two plants did not meet the current standards.

In addition to disputing the validity of those measures, the city maintains the upgrades are unnecessary because the treated wastewater, which is dumped nearly two miles offshore and at a depth of more than 200 feet, is not harmful in any way.

If the legislation is passed, "the city would have a stronger basis to urge the EPA and the court to evaluate our performance against the most appropriate, current standards, not standards based on EPA-recommended water-quality criteria from 1980, nearly 30 years ago," Tim Steinberger, director of the city's Department of Environmental Services, said in a written statement.

"And if evaluated against those standards, the city would be able to confirm what EPA concedes all of the biological and monitoring data already show — that our treatment plants are not posing any risk of harm to human health or the environment."

EPA spokesman Darrin Swartz-Larson said the city inaccurately portrayed the agency's position, saying the data showed a mixed picture.

UNUSUAL APPROACH

Even if the city is successful in getting the legislation passed, the effort may be for naught.

States usually revise their water-quality standards through an administrative process that under EPA rules requires scientific and technical justifications for the proposed changes and an open, transparent process that allows the public to comment on the proposals. Going the legislative route is unusual and raises questions about meeting EPA requirements.

"At this point, it's not clear from the EPA's perspective whether what's going on now (at the Legislature) would satisfy the process to adopt revised water-quality standards under the Clean Water Act," said Dean Higuchi, another EPA spokesman.

Steinberger said city officials have tried for more than a year to get the state to amend the standards through the normal administrative process, noting that a required review of the standards every three years already is overdue.

Unable to get the state to act on a timely basis, city officials turned to the Legislature this session for help.

Initially, the bill introduced at the city's request focused on the two pesticides, chlordane and dieldrin, and a bacterium, Enterococcus, that were at the center of the Sierra Club litigation and the EPA-ordered sewage-plant upgrades. The bill called for adopting the EPA standards for the pesticides and a 2005 DOH recommendation for Enterococcus.

But the two measures moving through the House and Senate (HB 834 and SB 1008) have since been amended to include a much broader adoption of the 2006 EPA standards for numerous pollutants. The EPA standards, based on national studies, are minimum levels that states must meet, although each state is free to adopt more stringent ones.

POLITICS DECRIED

Some environmental groups, particularly those involved in the litigation, and others have vigorously objected to changing pollutant measures via a political process.

They maintain that the city and state are attempting to weaken Hawai'i's stringent standards without any scientific analysis showing whether the national ones are appropriate here, especially given Hawai'i's year-round beach use, subtropical marine ecosystem, higher fish consumption and other factors that tend to distinguish it from other states.

The proposed changes, the critics add, could lead to more water pollution in a tourism-dominated state that relies heavily on its clean waters. That would put water users and seafood eaters at greater risk of illness and further threaten Hawai'i's fragile marine ecosystem, they say.

"I cannot support a proposal that would double or triple the amount of pesticides and bacteria in the water, particularly without a thorough scientific analysis of how this would impact Hawai'i," Kailua resident and scuba diver Elbridge Smith said in written testimony submitted to the Legislature.

Fred Madlener, board member of Hawai'i's Thousand Friends, another plaintiff in the sewage litigation, noted that the allowable levels for the enterococcus bacteria would increase fivefold and significantly raise the risk of illness for swimmers, including those in Waikiki, who swallow water with the higher bacteria counts.

"Tourism is such an important part of our commercial life here that it makes no sense to jeopardize it by downgrading our standards," he said.

The Sierra Club's Harris cited the example of pesticide levels permitted in local waters. For chlordane, the state years ago adopted a standard that was three times greater than the national one because Hawai'i consumed three times more fish compared with the U.S. average, he said. EPA subsequently lowered its standard, so Hawai'i's is now five times greater, he added.

Yet no analysis has been done to show the possible effects of lowering the Hawai'i threshold by a factor of five to match EPA's, according to Harris.

"This is just blindly adopting something," he said.

RESEARCH CITED

But proponents defended the proposed standards, saying EPA's thresholds are backed by extensive national research that cannot be matched at the state level, particularly during tough budget times.

Lau noted that the state uses other national standards, such as air-quality ones, to protect people and the environment.

James Moncur, director of the University of Hawai'i Water Resources Research Center, said the existing water-quality standards are unnecessarily stringent, and scientific results show little or no benefit would result from the massive costs to do the EPA-mandated sewage-plant upgrades.

"It's almost like building a bridge to nowhere," Moncur said.

The city's Steinberger said the environmental groups opposing the bills are doing so to further their interests in their litigation against the city. "Updating the water-quality standards is the right thing to do, plain and simple," he said.

The state has been working on possible revisions to a more narrow set of standards through the normal process, but that effort is still months away.

Just how much Hawai'i's standards would change under the legislation is unclear.

Some thresholds will increase, others will decrease and some will remain the same. But Lau said the measures are so complicated and involve so many variables that making a general characterization of the changes would be difficult. The city says the standards in most cases would remain the same or become more stringent.

State Sen. David Ige, chairman of the Senate Health Committee, said his panel approved SB 1008 last week largely based on the state's assurances that the public still would be adequately protected and because the city and state agreed the changes are needed. The bill now goes to the full Senate for a vote.