First of at least three reports we’ll be publishing about tonight’s Delridge Neighborhoods District Council meeting:

The acronym CSO – combined-sewer overflow – has loomed large over some western West Seattle neighborhoods in the past couple years, and tonight we learned that the state mandate to reduce CSOs will affect eastern West Seattle too, since the existing storage systems for the overflows “just aren’t enough.”

While the CSO-reduction plans in the works for the basins feeding the Murray (Lowman Beach) and Barton (Fauntleroy) pump stations are county projects, the city is responsible for CSOs in non-pump-station areas such as Longfellow Creek, and that’s what was discussed tonight by two Seattle Public Utilities reps at the DNDC meeting. They said that projects will be needed to keep millions more gallons of overflow out of local waterways.

The utility is working toward an Environmental Impact Statement for CSO reduction in areas including Delridge, but whatever projects are chosen won’t be built/implemented any earlier than 2016 – the state has set 2025 as a deadline. Nonetheless, the “scoping” process starts now, with a Delridge meeting coming up at 6:30 pm October 17th, Youngstown Cultural Arts Center.

Thousands of Delridge-area homes will get postal-mailed postcards about this shortly; next Monday, the city plans to update its website with volumes of information about what might be considered (keep an eye on this page: seattle.gov/cso). This will all be part of a public-comment period from Monday (September 25th) through November 7th, and you will have online options for commenting too. Since there are no specific plans yet, the SPU reps at tonight’s meeting explained that this will be for voicing of general concerns – including specific neighborhood issues (maybe a wildlife or environmental concern, for example) that an environmental-impact statement should take into account.

We’ll have a followup with more details on this when the official info comes out Monday.