COEUR d'ALENE - Won't even go there.

You won't hear those jokes here.

Art, of course, is subjective, but Coeur d'Alene's newest piece, Frolicking Creatures, is exactly that, art.

What kind of creatures will the 6- to 10-feet-tall statues depict?

Microorganisms.

The kind that treat wastewater, which is why the $35,000 piece will go up in May in front of the city's wastewater treatment plant off Hubbard Avenue.

"It just all made sense," said Alan Dodge, Coeur d'Alene artist who brainstormed the winning piece with wife Mary Dee Dodge. "You can't make these creatures up, they're wild."

With names like protozoa and metazoa, the structures will also include informational plaques detailing the life and jobs of each one, so school groups can learn the life of keeping water clean on tours.

If making art about waste sounds out of the blue, it's not.

The Mayor's Institute of Design, a team of city designers, recommended the wastewater treatment plant be a center point of education corridor design, both in science and aesthetics, when they toured Coeur d'Alene in 2009.

What a transformation the plant has seen since then.

The city has put in roughly $15 million in improvements in the last couple of years, in large part to a $13 million stimulus loan with minuscule interest that will save the city a couple of million dollars.

Improvements include a million-gallon-capacity tank (the place where all those microorganisms do their feasting) that will "increase our solid-handling capacity for at least the next 20 years," according to Sid Fredrickson, wastewater superintendent.

"A monster," he called it.

The improvements helped put a court case between cities Coeur d'Alene, Post Falls and Hayden Area Regional Sewer Board and the Environmental Protection Agency on hold as the sides appear close to reaching an agreement.

The Washington Department of Ecology's Spokane River cleanup plan, approved by EPA per federal regulations, called for upstream discharge sources like Coeur d'Alene to implement more strict discharge standards into the river to benefit downstream Washington's water quality.

Idaho agencies said those standards were even more strict (and expensive to maintain) than other discharge agencies in Washington face, and filed suit in 2010.

But it could be settled soon.

Through compromise, Coeur d'Alene agreed to start removing phosphorus levels Feb. 1, a month earlier originally required, if it can average 50 phosphorus-parts-per-billion discharged instead of the original demand, 36 parts-per-billion. Coeur d'Alene discharges 890 to 1,000 parts-per-billion now.

Fredrickson said he is reviewing the conditions of the draft permit before anyone can sign off on the agreement, but "it looks encouraging."

The comment period on the permit would likely begin after the new year, he said.

Brian Nickel, permit writer with DEQ, confirmed terms of the deal Friday.

Back to art.

The city's arts commission receives 1 percent of all above-ground capital projects for its funding. The wastewater plant, having underwent all that work, generated the money itself.

Another piece, the $15,000 "Totem to the Water of Life" statue, by Dale Young, will accompany "Frolicking Creatures." The $50,000 call to artists received 34 responses, according to the arts commission.

And art, everyone knows, is art, so no jokes here.